Company announcement from Pirical’s CEO Jason Ku

I’d like to share some thoughts about what we’ve been seeing in the market, and then some exciting news about how Pirical is responding.

People Analytics, using data about people to continuously improve your business, continues to mature as a practice and we have been at its coalface with our legal sector clients for several years now.

I am proud of the reputation Pirical has built for busting people management myths, identifying biases, and driving profitability.

We have used firms’ data to identify tens of millions of pounds worth of HR opportunities.

We have helped spur market-wide collaboration on diversity and inclusion with our breakthrough benchmarking exercises.

 We have set awesome data-driven recruitment metrics, including showing that kids who outperform their school’s average A-level results make better lawyers.

As our customers have embraced more data-driven management, and experienced better financial outcomes from People Analytics, Pirical has been called upon to answer more questions, supply more beautiful board-ready stories, and refresh insights on a regular cycle.

It’s been an amazing, lively journey and I’m grateful for the hard work of our staff to this point, and to our customers who have entrusted us to go on this journey with them.

The business case for using Pirical has always been clear: we drive impact by asking the right questions, finding hidden insights in data, and presenting the call to action in a simple and beautiful way. Towards this we have relentlessly focused on making our work faster, more insightful, and more impactful.

Having worked now with the majority of the top firms, customers are increasingly asking us to share our wealth of experience.

Customers want us to help benchmark their firm, to see how they’re doing in context. And we’re more often being asked what else they could or should be doing with their data.

It used to be that customers would ask us to help with analyses that answered specific questions. But now, in 8 out of 10 customer discussions, I am asked ‘what else is Pirical working on that I need to know about?’

As we tackled more and more People Analytics topics, and as the Pirical team grew, we needed new ways to manage and make use of everything we had learned.

First, we established a Knowledge Engineering team tasked with building technology that helps us manage everything-we-know, and record how-we-came-to-know-it (think Knowledge Management System on steroids).

Then we established a Data Operations team to help standardise the way we processed and derived insights from each customers’ data, so we could benefit from similarities and make sure we were comparing apples-to-apples.

More recently we set about thinking, what if we could give all of our customers direct access to Pirical’s knowledge?

Towards this ambition we started to design a cost-effective service that can deliver all of Pirical’s accumulated People Analytics insights for the legal sector, On Demand.  And so, as Pirical’s knowledge continues to grow, so will that of our customers.

I won’t dwell on the technology story, because we prefer to focus on the value created, except to say that it has been no small feat.

Since 2015 we have developed a suite of cutting-edge analytics and data engineering capabilities. Concretely, Pirical is now one of only a handful of companies worldwide deriving steady commercial value from knowledge graphs, a novel way of storing data popularised by applications such as Wikipedia and Amazon Alexa.

Most comparable solutions to Pirical are plug-ins to a single data system. They expect complete data. They expect standardised data. They are only as good as you are at jamming your square-shaped world into their round-shaped holes.

But Pirical has always met our customers where they are, in the real world, where data is nuanced and multidimensional. The legal sector has its own data-personality that cannot be standardised with off-the-shelf HR reporting. As a rule, insights that lead to impact can only be derived when domain experts are leading both the processing and the analysis.

With this post, I want to publicly credit the team’s ingenuity at scaling the ways we can handle the volume, complexity and idiosyncrasies of our customers’ data, and say thank you for their efforts.

Folks, we built it. Pirical On Demand (POD) is now live with customers.

Having been co-developed and piloted by top law firms in recent months, POD is now and will be the core of our analytics offering going forward.

Pirical On Demand is filled with pre-built answers to the most common questions we've answered for clients over 5+ years.