Data & AI for the Legal CFO: Why Finance is Under Pressure to Change

For many legal CFOs, the expectations placed on finance have never been higher. Firms are navigating increasing commercial pressure, growing operational complexity, and a demand for faster, more accurate insight. Yet in many cases, the finance function is still constrained by legacy processes, fragmented systems, and data that is difficult to trust.

From a Data & AI perspective, this is the core challenge: finance is being asked to operate as a strategic partner but is still set up as a reporting function.

Today, I’ll explore the challenges holding legal finance teams back, and why many firms are rethinking the role of finance. This is the first in a three-part series looking at how data, analytics, and AI can help CFOs address these challenges, create more intelligent ways of working, and lay the foundations for long-term transformation.

Commonly within legal firms, finance teams remain heavily dependent on spreadsheets and manual processes. Even where systems exist, they often don’t work together in a way that enables seamless insight. As a result, finance professionals spend a significant amount of time:

This isn’t just inefficient; it essentially limits the role that finance can play in the business. Highly skilled teams are spending their time preparing data, rather than using it to inform decisions, challenge assumptions, and drive commercial outcomes.

The problem here isn’t due to lack of data, it’s how that data is structured and accessed. Across most legal firms, financial data sits across multiple, disconnected systems. These might include:

Individually, these systems provide value. But collectively, they create fragmentation. To build a complete view of performance, finance teams must manually bring this data together: extracting, transforming, and reconciling it before it becomes usable. Until that happens, insight is delayed. And in many cases, by the time the data is ready, it’s already out of date.

One of the biggest issues I see when talking to legal customers is a lack of confidence in the numbers. This is created when data is:

Therefore, becoming difficult for finance leaders and the wider business to rely on it. This creates what we often describe as a “data trust gap”. Decisions are made more cautiously, or in some cases, delayed entirely, because stakeholders aren’t confident in the information they’re working with.

For CFOs, this is a critical issue. Without trusted data, finance cannot effectively guide the business.

As law firms expand across geographies, practice areas, and entity structures, the finance landscape becomes inherently more complex, placing additional strain on systems, processes, and people.

The challenge becomes even more pronounced in larger, global law firms:

Each additional entity increases the volume of data, the number of reconciliations required, and the risk of inconsistency.

So, what does this mean? A lot of finance teams are spending too much time looking backwards. Reporting cycles are slow, data takes time to pull together, and insight often arrives after the point where it can really influence decisions. That limits the impact finance can have across the business.

For CFOs, the role is shifting. It’s no longer just about producing reports, it’s about helping the business understand what’s happening and what to do next. To do that, finance needs better access to joined-up, reliable data, and less reliance on manual work. That’s what enables faster, more confident decisions and creates space for teams to focus on more strategic activity.

In the next instalment of this series, our CTO will explore what that shift looks like in practice: from predictive analytics and decision intelligence through to the role of agentic AI in areas such as billing, profitability analysis, and WIP-to-cash processes. The final post will then look at how to turn ambition into action, focusing on the foundations, use cases, governance, and roadmap needed to deliver value and scale transformation over time.