Visualisation is the key to reclaiming efficiency
Sydney, Australia: Thursday 5 November 2015 – In the age of big data, efficiency is falling by the wayside in the face of overwhelming volumes of information. However, the ability to harness evidence benefiting clients remains the backbone of any good legal practice.
New visualisation technology holds the promise of making big data more manageable for legal professionals.
Since its implementation under the Personal Property Securities Act 2009, the Personal Property Securities Register has ushered in an era of improved accessibility to information about security interests over assets and companies; in 2014-15, there were more than 7.5 million searches on the PPSR – a rise of 8 per cent on the number of searches in 2013-14.
However, the increasing volume of data is creating new challenges for practitioners. A thorough understanding of all the property and securities information of an individual or company is key when advising clients of potential risks or opportunities around asset ownership.
Establishing clarity around business and asset ownership and secured interests over assets can be highly complex, requiring interrogation of disparate source registers and sorting of data sets – a process that often proves time consuming and increases the risk of oversight.
Moses Samaha, Veda’s General Manager, Commercial and Property Solutions, said finding a balance between having a complete and detailed understanding of all available information and delivering timely legal advice is an ongoing battle for lawyers.
“As the focus on improved efficiency and productivity grows across the legal community, the ability to swiftly and accurately act on behalf of clients is becoming increasingly important. When client expectations aren’t met, legal firms and practitioners will lose out in an increasingly competitive market.
“When it comes to the PPSR, speed to outcome means not only quickly retrieving data but efficiently interpreting the results. To that end, Veda has launched the next generation of our PPSR solution. It builds on our ASIC data solution in applying data visualisation thinking to create a more insightful and intuitive interface for legal professionals. And it is the combined effect across ASIC and PPSR data that makes the solution so powerful. A series of searches that took 18 minutes using government registers took only 2.5 minutes in VedaCheck Visual,” Mr Samaha said.
Veda’s data visualisation interface, VedaCheck Visual, shows the connections between business owners, asset owners, lenders and their security in a more intuitive way. It fast-tracks investigation and streamlines understanding, reducing the risk of error and enabling informed conversations with colleagues and clients.
“Introducing visualisation technology into the process of extracting information from the PPSR holds out the promise of speed to insight,”Mr Samaha said.
“We understand that the complexity of PPSR can create headaches for legal professionals. But the same depth of information that often trips up the conflict assessment process can be harnessed into a powerful tool towards improved client experience and more efficient legal research,” Mr Samaha added.