The Challenge
A mass tort case acquisition firm raises capital from litigation funders, spreads it across marketing campaigns for several torts, and moves the resulting cases through intake and on to partner handling firms. Funders invest in tranches, and each tranche comes with expectations: how much will be spent on which torts, how many cases it should produce, and what those cases may be worth.
Answering a funder’s questions meant stitching together data that lived in very different places: the firm’s CRM, a separate marketing spend platform, weekly spreadsheets from handling firms and vendors, and budget files maintained by hand. Every report was a manual assembly job, and any number a funder questioned was hard to trace back to its source.
The firm needed to:
- Give funders a clear, current view of their portfolio without building each report by hand.
- Track spend against budget and case goals for every tort and every tranche.
- Follow cases through each milestone, including how quickly handling firms moved them forward.
- Onboard new portfolios and funders without rebuilding the reporting each time.
The Approach
BRIO started with the audience rather than the data. Working with the firm’s leadership, the team wireframed two families of reporting: a funder-facing view of portfolio composition and performance, and a more detailed internal view for servicing those portfolios. That discovery settled an early decision that shaped everything after it: funders need clarity about their investment, not a tour of the firm’s internal workings, so the funder workbook came first.
Underneath the reporting, BRIO designed the data model before building any dashboards. Source data from every system was mapped into a single structure, so the same definitions of a case, a milestone, and a dollar of spend applied everywhere. Each release then went through structured rounds of client testing and feedback before it was finalized.
The Solution
A Layered Data Pipeline: Raw data from the CRM, spend platform, firm data warehouse, and weekly feeds lands in a cloud data lake and is refined in stages, from raw records to cleaned and conformed data to a reporting-ready layer. Transformation pipelines handle each step, so the reporting layer only ever sees data that has been validated and mapped.
Weekly Feeds Without the Scramble: Handling firm updates, marketing budgets, and vendor campaign spend arrive on a weekly cadence. Standard templates and mappings bring each feed into the model consistently, including the translation of each partner’s own case statuses into the firm’s standard milestones.
Funder Servicing Workbooks in Tableau: Published on Tableau Cloud, the funder workbook covers portfolio value, tranche performance, spend versus budget over the life of the investment, cases by tort and jurisdiction, and the time cases spend in the marketing and handling firm pipelines. Filters and slicers let a funder narrow the view to the tiers and tranches they care about.
A Case Valuation Modeler: An interactive modeler lets users adjust assumptions such as tier values and settlement timing and see how projected portfolio value responds, turning a static report into a planning tool.
Numbers That Hold Up to Questions: During testing, every figure the client questioned was traced back to the specific intake records behind it. Those reviews sharpened the metric definitions themselves. For example, pipeline timing was re-anchored to milestones that handling firms report reliably, and “fallout” was reframed as a retention rate that tells the same story more constructively.
Building a Data Culture: Trustworthy numbers are as much about people as pipelines. BRIO worked alongside the firm’s leadership to establish shared, documented definitions for every metric, review questioned figures together, and refine those definitions as the business learned. The result is an organization, and a set of funders, that speak the same language about performance.
Repeatable Onboarding: Onboarding templates and status mappings mean a new portfolio or funder plugs into the existing model instead of starting over.
Conversational and Agentic AI on Governed Data: Because every metric lives in one governed model, the firm can put AI to work on it safely. Working through Claude and Tableau Pulse and Tableau Next, users can ask questions in plain language and let AI agents analyze the portfolio, with every answer grounded in the same trusted definitions that power the funder reporting rather than in a spreadsheet someone exported last month.
Technical foundation
- Cloud data lake with a layered raw, conformed, and reporting-ready data model
- Automated transformation pipelines for each source system
- Tableau Prep flows for shared calculations
- Tableau Cloud published data sources and extracts
- Claude, Tableau Pulse, and Tableau Next for conversational and agentic analytics
- Funder-facing and internal servicing workbooks with interactive modeling
The Impact
The firm now has a single, governed source of truth behind the reporting its funders see:
- Funders get a consistent view of portfolio performance instead of one-off, hand-built reports.
- Spend, budget, and case progress are tracked by tort and by tranche in one place.
- Every metric has an agreed definition and can be traced back to the underlying intakes.
- New portfolios and funders onboard into the same model rather than a new build.
- A data culture built on shared, documented metric definitions.
- Conversational and agentic AI that works from the same governed data as the reporting.
For a business built on the confidence of its investors, that traceability is the point. The reporting does not just look credible; it holds up when someone asks how a number was calculated.
