About Xakia
Meet the team: Brandon Spencer
Meet Brandon our VP of Sales in North America, who has a passion for LegalTech and is dedicated to helping in-house legal teams of all sizes.
Ari Dyball has been with Xakia since its very first day, has built the legal data analytics program and has vast knowledge about legal team reporting.
Name
Ari Dyball
Job title
Data Insights Engineer
Tell us a bit about yourself and your experience
I have done a few things: art history, music, (which I still do), furniture making, printing/publishing and a law degree - and for the last 8(!) years I have been at Xakia. I live in Brunswick, Melbourne with my girlfriend Annie and our cat Beaujolais.
Fun fact about you
- I have never found it difficult to get into Berghain.
- I actually want to wear a suit to work, but I ended up in tech.
- When I was in my final semester of law school, I worked for a barrister and helped to draft submissions for an Australian High Court case. At the end of semester, my lecturer set that exact case as a final essay topic. My grade was 70%, but we won the case.
- Years ago, I was in a terrible band that sold a few songs to the TV show 'Neighbours'. Now I’m in a much better band (I think) but I doubt we will sell anything to anyone.
What song could you listen to on repeat and why? 🎵
We will be here all day if I need to narrow it down to one, so I’m going to give you a few and not tell you why:- Hyperballad – Bjork
- Space Oddity – David Bowie
- Don’t Worry Baby – The Beach Boys
- Pyramids – Frank Ocean
- Cosmic Dancer – T.Rex
- It’s all over now, baby blue – Them (cover version)
- How to Disappear Completely – Radiohead
- Unfinished Sympathy – Massive Attack
- Dancing in the Dark – Bruce Springsteen
- The Big Ship – Brian Eno
- Wildfires - Sault
What's your favorite aspect of Xakia's interactive legal dashboards and reports?
My mother said that you shouldn’t have favorites when it comes to your children. 😉 My favorite aspect is the configurability.
I have been here a long time and seen Xakia's in-house legal software grow enormously. We capture such a wide range of data on many aspects of in-house legal workflow - matters, tasks, disputes, contracts, spend, intake, budgets, custom logs, custom fields etc...
Teams often have wildly different areas that they want to focus on for their dashboards and reports, industry specific, or something unique to their organization. For this reason, a strict 'one size fits all' approach is never going to work, so it has been essential that Xakia's in-house legal solution included a high level of configurability.
My inbox used to be full of clients asking us to fill in holes in reporting and dashboards, now that the product is much more configurable to client’s specific needs, my inbox is much more manageable.
I joined Xakia in 2016 and love working here for its open and inclusive culture. I love collaborating with my peers and coming to solutions together to make all stakeholders experience a pleasant one.
Why work at Xakia?
Friendship, and also, although I’m not a lawyer, they are my people. They do a difficult job. In house lawyers have to carve out a pretty unique space in a business that is very different to lawyers who work for firms. Analytics is about communication, and if I can help to make it easier for in-house teams to communicate with the business and to be understood then I get a kick out of that.
My Xakia Tip
Analytics wise, there is a lot you can get out of Xakia's in-house legal software with just a few data points, but to add the most nuance to the data you are capturing, I would take advantage of legal matter templates. They are a really effective way of giving your data deeper dimensions.
Simple, powerful, affordable legal matter management software
We make legal matter management software easy and affordable for in-house legal departments of all sizes. Streamline your legal workflows and increase productivity with the Xakia matter management software. Book a demo today to learn more, or sign up for a free 14-day trial to see it in action.