Client Success Story
Snapshot: Manatt
Modernized financial reporting by replacing manual, spreadsheet-based processes with dynamic, self-serve models in Vena, enabling real-time insights and faster decision-making.
Accelerated operational efficiency by partnering with ProLytics to implement automated data models, reducing month-end close timelines and saving significant weekly hours.
Enhanced performance visibility with drill-down productivity and revenue models, improving utilization tracking and insights.
Strengthened strategic impact of finance by freeing up time for cross-functional collaboration and enabling faster, data-driven responses to business needs.
The flexibility of Vena, its seamless integration with Office, and the ability to save and analyze historical data have been game-changers. Monthly reporting is now completed in a fraction of the time, allowing us to focus on strategic insights rather than data validation.
– Sr. Manager, Financial Analytics
Manatt Phelps & Phillips LLP
About Manatt
Manatt is a multidisciplinary, integrated national professional services firm combining legal expertise with business strategy and consulting. With more than 450 professionals, the firm advises clients across corporate and finance, government and regulatory, and litigation matters. Recognized globally, Manatt ranked 148th in the 2024 Global 200 survey of highest-grossing law firms.
The Challenge: Long Manual Reporting Cycles in a Fast-Paced Legal Environment
Like many firms in the legal industry, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips’ finance team was constrained by manual data entry, static reports, and long turnaround times for performance insights. “We had static reporting and rigid tools,” says Matt Crowley, Senior Financial Analyst at Manatt. “When leadership needed answers, it took too long to get them. By the time we built a report, the data was already stale.” Client pushback on rates, productivity challenges, and economic shifts made it more important than ever to respond quickly with real-time data. However:
- Legacy tools lacked flexibility for evolving needs, hindering ad hoc reporting, and insights were often delayed or incomplete.
- Monthly reporting was rigid, time-consuming, and heavily reliant on manual data aggregation and validation from multiple sources.
- The finance team spent more time preparing reports than analyzing them, limiting their ability to drive strategic initiatives.
The Solution: Unlocking Real-Time Reporting With Vena
ProLytics played a critical role in Manatt’s successful implementation and early success with Vena. The team:
- helped architect the initial data model for budgeting and revenue tracking, and
- provided ongoing support throughout the expansion of Vena’s capabilities.
With their expertise, the ProLytics team created a productivity model that drills down to daily activity, allowing for detailed insights into attorney utilization and department-level efficiency. ProLytics also guided iterations to streamline reporting structures and ensure accuracy across all outputs, becoming a trusted partner in Manatt’s digital finance transformation.
Vena replaced manual reporting processes with dynamic, self-serve models that Matt and his team could expand, iterate and improve in real time. Starting with a budgeting model implemented with ProLytics’ help, the team quickly scaled to build reports across revenue, productivity, and department performance—many with drill-downs and time comparisons built in.
Matt estimates he now saves at least 15 hours per week and has cut month-end setup from a full week down to just a few hours. That time has been reinvested in collaboration with marketing, business development, and operations—making finance a strategic partner, not just a back-office function.
Vena’s PowerPoint integration allows Matt to easily build board decks with 50–60 slides directly from his data models, freeing up time to analyze trends and answer ad hoc questions. He also caught aging unbilled inventory and receivables faster using Vena, allowing leadership to take corrective action early.
Matt participated in the Vena Copilot beta and plans to fully integrate it into his daily workflow over the coming year. He’s already planning to train his analyst team and extend usage across the organization. Future plans in Vena also include building revenue forecasting models, enhancing existing productivity tracking down to the daily level, integrating with Power BI for richer dashboard visualizations, and expanding scenario planning in collaboration with leadership.
“ProLytics has been an incredible partner, helping us transform our FP&A processes.”
– Sr. Manager, Financial Analytics, Manatt Phelps & Phillips LLP
Results
ProLytics helped empower the firm to transition from data preparation to actionable insights, and reduced the time required for monthly reporting by 80%!
The finance team can now focus on analyzing trends and driving strategic decisions that shape the firm’s future.
Looking Ahead
ProLytics continues to provide proactive managed services that support the firm’s evolving needs while maximizing its Vena investment. E.g. API integrations.
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