Legal Services Provider Transforms Staffing Process With XGBoost & Prophet

There were two challenges that this client needed help with, understanding the upcoming demand for services and finding the right number of specialized attorneys to handle the work.

One of the initial questions that needed to be answered was does the company have the appropriate data required to build out these models? After a few initial iterations of the model building, it became evident that there was enough data to create a powerful forecasting solution.

By using AWS’s Sagemaker to create capability limits, and visualizing them with Microsoft’s Power BI, phData was able to show that it would not only be possible but could quickly be accomplished.

To build the demand forecast, phData leveraged sales pipeline history data from Salesforce. A variety of indicators were created, like age of an opportunity and lagged number of opportunities opened, that provided business insight for the model to learn from.

A combination of XGBoost and Facebook’s Prophet was used to create the demand forecast. 

Prophet was chosen due to its exceptional ability to determine the overall level of opportunities closed whereas XGBoost was leveraged for its ability to learn from lagging factors to create the overall shape of demand.

To create a realistic forecast of supply for available attorneys, phData worked closely with various team leaders across the business to capture all business context. This allowed the creation of a rules-based methodology, which incorporated factors like roll-off date, attrition, and hiring trends.