Case study

Five years inside one firm's finance operations.

Kusava Currents wasn't built in a lab. For the last five years we've worked in weekly sessions inside a litigation-focused firm of just over 100 attorneys, building the operating layer its finance team actually runs on: budgeting, compensation, profitability, and executive reporting.

5 years
of weekly working sessions, and counting
~50
recurring reports that now build themselves
100%
of profit centers budgeting self-serve in one system
~4x
firm revenue growth over the period of our work

The starting point

More than a dozen profit centers, each budgeting in its own spreadsheet, in its own format. Finance spent weeks every cycle stitching them together. Monthly practice-group meetings each needed a presentation that finance assembled by hand, every month.

Reporting lived in an on-premises BI stack: costly to develop against, unstable APIs, and no role-based access, which meant sensitive financial views could not be safely delegated beyond a small circle.

What we built, iteratively, together

The platform began as a role-based interface over the firm's existing data model and grew as the firm's needs did, eventually migrating wholesale to Azure Synapse Analytics: a managed ETL pipeline and data warehouse replaced the on-premises stack that had become the bottleneck.

Self-serve budgeting

Every profit-center owner plans in one standardized system; consolidation happens automatically. The spreadsheet-stitching job no longer exists.

Compensation planning

Raises, bonuses, and promotions are modeled and calculated in the same system the budget lives in.

Profitability, all the way down

By client, matter, office, position, and individual timekeeper, with net contribution to overhead and profit. Overhead allocation goes as deep as office rent distributed by space ratios.

Capacity analysis

Over- and under-staffing visible against hours goals, by matter and by department, so staffing decisions run on data instead of instinct.

Billing-rate management

Rates managed, tracked, and applied in one place instead of scattered across spreadsheets and memos.

Policy enforcement with teeth

Automated time-entry policy alerts and workflows, with penalty implications calculated by the system. In the first year, six figures in policy-related bonus adjustments were applied.

Where it stands today

The whole firm works in the system. Executives read dashboards with a clear monthly picture. Practice leaders see their own groups and nothing else. Associates and counsel enter weekly hours projections directly. Roughly fifty recurring reports, including the monthly practice-group presentations, generate themselves.

Over the period of our work together the firm has grown revenue nearly fourfold. We don't claim credit for that growth. We claim the reporting, planning, and control infrastructure that supported it.

Security grew with it

Midway through the engagement, the firm's own clients began requiring ISO 27001 and ISO 27701 compliance of their vendors. We didn't argue; we got certified. Kusava is built and operated by an ISO 27001 and ISO 27701 certified organization, and on the Enterprise tier the platform deploys inside your own cloud tenant, so your data never leaves an environment your IT team controls.

Talk to someone who runs it.

We keep the firm's name confidential; that is their standard term for every vendor. But qualified prospects can speak directly with finance team members who work in the system daily. Reference calls are arranged under NDA.

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