From $1M in manual data prepto 80% automated in 10 weeks.

The Situation

This firm is a leading provider of litigation support services — managing large-scale data across hundreds of legal cases annually. Each case brings new client datasets: claimant lists, financial records, address files — arriving in different formats, from different systems, with different structures. Their data operations team was responsible for preparing this data for downstream legal processes, case analysis, and NCOA validation at high volume.

As case volumes grew, so did the burden. The firm needed a way to standardize, automate, and scale their data preparation operation — without sacrificing the accuracy that legal work demands.

The Complication

Every new dataset was a unique manual project. Analysts would receive a file, validate the structure, rename columns to match internal schemas, standardize names and addresses, join and union datasets, run manual address cleansing, submit for NCOA validation, review quality, and finally load to the database. Eleven steps, every time, for every dataset.

There was no reusability. No automation. No visibility into data readiness until the process was complete — which meant quality issues surfaced late, requiring expensive rework. The team had quantified the cost: 12 analysts spending 60% of their time on data preparation, at an average cost of $70 per hour, for a total annual burden of over $1 million — just for data prep.

With an Alteryx implementation on the table, the firm needed a partner who understood both the legal data complexity and the Alteryx platform deeply enough to build something that would actually scale.

The Solution

As an Alteryx Authorized Partner, DataWalkers designed and deployed a three-milestone automated data preparation framework — collapsing eleven manual steps into a single one-click Alteryx workflow.

Milestone 1 — Discovery & Foundation (Week 1): We stood up the Alteryx environment, ran hands-on enablement workshops for the analyst team, aligned the governance and security framework, and mapped every existing manual process end-to-end.

Milestone 2 — White Glove Automation Delivery (Weeks 2–6): We designed and built three fully automated, production-deployed Alteryx workflows covering the firm highest-volume use cases. Each workflow embedded automated data quality rules, exception handling, and a Nominatim-powered address lookup service for US addresses — eliminating the manual cleansing step entirely.

Milestone 3 — SOP & Scale Enablement (Weeks 7–10): We documented the operating model, created SOPs for onboarding new datasets, established workflow naming conventions and versioning standards, and delivered a roadmap of next-wave automation candidates across the full case portfolio.

The Impact

The eleven-step manual process became a one-click automated workflow. New datasets that previously took days to onboard were ready in hours. The data quality report that used to be a manual spot-check became an automatic output of every workflow run — giving the team real-time visibility into data readiness for the first time.

• 80%Reduction in manual data preparation effortImmediate 60% reduction, scaling to 80%+ as additional workflows are deployed across the case portfolio.
• $1M+Annual data prep cost — now dramatically reduced24,960 analyst hours per year largely freed from manual wrangling and redirected to higher-value legal analysis.
• 10 WkKickoff to fully automated production workflowsThree production Alteryx workflows deployed — with reusable templates ready for rapid expansion to new case types.
• HoursNew dataset onboarding time — down from daysReusable workflow components mean any new dataset is onboarded through the same governed, automated process.