A National Law Firm Turned Work Data Into Seven-Figure Savings with Insightful

The Challenge

Scaling a 700-employee Remote Workforce Without a Clear View of Capacity

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When a national law firm moved from 100% office-based work to fully remote operations, its leaders needed a clear picture of whether the new model was working. With approximately 700 employees serving financial institutions across the U.S., small gaps in workload allocation were affecting capacity, quality, and client service.

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Teams frequently reported that they were out of capacity and needed additional hires. Leadership suspected that the firm had sufficient headcount but lacked a reliable, unified view of how work was being allocated. 

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This left senior leaders heavily dependent on managers’ assessments, even as they questioned whether some teams were being managed effectively. They couldn’t say with confidence whether a team needed more staff, better workflows, or simply more effective leadership.

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At the same time, the firm faced a persistent problem conducting employee performance evaluations. The firm’s legacy process relied on cobbled-together daily logs and didn’t provide a clear picture of workload and capacity across teams. Investigating a single performance concern could take 20 to 30 hours, involve three to five people, and require data from at least seven different sources. That meant hugely delayed decision making, all while pulling key employees away from their regular responsibilities.

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The firm needed a solution that could provide a consistent view of workload, capacity, and performance across its remote individuals and teams. With improved work insights, leadership could better evaluate staffing requests, understand how effectively managers were distributing work, and determine whether remote operations were delivering the expected results.

The Solution

Insightful’s Work Data Enables Better Work Distribution

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Insightful made a difference almost immediately after onboarding. For the first time, leadership could see that its assumptions about how remote work was being done did not match what was happening across the firm. The findings revealed substantial differences in work patterns, management quality, and workload distribution between teams.

Insightful’s customizable productivity labeling and trend reports allowed the firm to focus on the data most relevant to its operations. Leaders could look beyond isolated numbers and understand why output varied over time. Even better, leadership could now distinguish employees who needed coaching from those who simply lacked assignments, were waiting for information, or faced process barriers.

A clearer picture of capacity soon emerged. Some teams had internal capacity that was not being used effectively, while employees elsewhere were working at an unsustainable pace. 

With clearer evidence, leadership identified concrete improvement opportunities:

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• More effective workload distribution: Managers resequenced priorities and redirected assignments based on available capacity, helping work move more evenly across teams.
• Stronger leadership and coaching: The firm identified teams that needed more effective management and provided targeted training to help their leaders improve.
• Protection against burnout: Leadership introduced a regular huddle to spot overworked employees and prevent additional projects from falling to them.

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The firm has continued to expand its implementation of Insightful and has made it part of its daily management rhythm, giving leaders a consistent basis for decisions about capacity, coaching, and employee support.

The Results

Seven-Figure Savings and Higher Output from a Fully Remote Workforce

With a data-driven view of capacity across its remote workforce, the firm can now make staffing and workload decisions based on evidence rather than assumptions. Managers can identify available capacity, address process barriers, and distribute assignments more effectively.

The results extend from operational efficiency to service quality:

• Over seven figures in savings: The firm avoided significant unnecessary spend by finding unused internal capacity, and where additional hiring could be avoided.
• Higher file count per employee: The firm increased file count per head, a critical metric for its frontline processors, by improving how work was prioritized, assigned, and completed.
• Greater client satisfaction: More consistent workflows and streamlined delivery contributed to measurable improvements in client satisfaction. 
• Fewer errors: By improving workflow continuity and reducing the stopping and restarting associated with errors, the firm increased process quality.

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The firm continues to build on the work insights delivered by Insightful. It’s now preparing to use Workforce Analytics and its AI Adoption Report feature to establish a performance baseline for measuring ROI from its artificial intelligence tools. By comparing throughput before and after implementation, leadership will be able to spot which AI tools are being used effectively. And identify the firm’s biggest opportunities for automation.