by
Helen Hamilton-Shaw
| Mar 30, 2012
An adbridged version of this article appeared in the May issue of Managing Partner Magazine.
Helen Hamilton-Shaw is director of services with leading law firm network LawNet. She reports on the role played by IT in strategic and practical terms amongst the network’s independent law firm members, which range from £2m to £15m turnover.
Information technology is set to be a game changer as we enter the new era of post-LSA markets, where commoditised services are likely to push an increasing number of legal service transactions online.
For the mid-sized, independent firms that make up LawNet, we are seeing customer-facing offerings that range from online wills to mobile apps targeted at employers.
But while online sales may be the headline grabber, it’s just as likely to be the backroom infrastructure and practice management solutions that are exercising management teams, according to our research.
It’s certainly the case that your IT must support your business in the delivery of excellence to clients. If your systems don't match up, the client experience is likely to be damaged.
Using technology to achieve efficiencies and reduce costs has massive potential for law firms and I anticipate they will be making much more of this in future.
Similarly, there are risk and compliance advantages. An Information Technology plan is an essential part of our required ISO standard, the LawNet Quality System, and similarly on the Lexcel joint accreditation route we offer, but that’s a minimum requirement for any firm worth its salt these days. Any decent system will make it easier to evidence compliance; and intranets make it easier to circulate policies and procedures to keep staff up to date and properly briefed.
Many of the resources and services we provide to LawNet member firms are online or IT based – whether it’s webcast training for professional development; our portal for risk management processes; or serviced offerings for document archiving, online precedents, case law and marketing communication software.
My job involves a degree of second-guessing to develop new services that will be ready and in place when our firms realise they need them, but we also regularly research with members to better understand their challenges.
We usually drill down to the most relevant contacts through our 28 specialist groups, which are dedicated to sharing inter-firm information on both professional and practice issues. These include a practice management and IT group, which we canvassed recently to identify common themes.
Infrastructure
In terms of physical equipment, a number of our firms have made the move to cloud solutions and will be sharing their experiences at our next practice management IT day, although the majority in our survey sample were fairly evenly split in their choice of virtualised or local servers, with software provided on a local PC or through their own server.
For Martyn Bateman, practice manager at Breeze & Wyles in Hertfordshire, the last year has seen the virtualisation of user desktops with thin client desktop terminals linked to a main server. He said: “This is ensuring consistent functionality across the firm, has much reduced our help desk time and is proving more efficient.”
At Harvey Ingram - recently merged with Borneos to create a £20m firm with 350 staff operating across the Midlands and Home Counties - integration and consolidation of systems from the two firms has been the main focus for the past year. According to Tim Percival, business development director, IT has to be at the heart of the firm’s strategy: “Growth, different sites, consolidation - all factors that cry out for IT solutions and inevitably much of our focus has been internal over the last 12 months. The quality and speed of inter-office connections was a crucial factor, but most important was the recognition that IT is crucial to integrating the businesses and an appropriate level of investment is essential.”
The firm has undertaken a penetrating review which has helped them to set out a route map for the next 18 months, and will completely refresh the infrastructure with new switches, pipes and server provision. Tim added: “Our issues are the same as smaller firms within LawNet, albeit ours may be a little more complex because of our size and geographic coverage. We all need a robust, secure system which can cope with the future commoditisation of legal services, good client services, and connections into social media and the outside world.”
At Mogers in Bath, managing partner Steven Treharne has gone for virtual servers. “If we were bigger or smaller, cloud solutions would have been a cost-effective option. Instead, we’ve taken a five to seven year approach - our new servers will work for us in that timeframe, after that we can probably go for cheaper options which will suit the business at that time.”
Mobile working
Also on the agenda at Mogers is a move to mobile working, with laptops that can be docked throughout the building, taking the shift away from dedicated desks and fixed PC’s, in a move that’s intended to enable better use of physical space as the firm grows.
In the open plan, single floor offices of George Davis in Manchester, the shift has already taken place. The firm is operating on a considerably reduced floor space with its customer-focussed team approach. Making the shift from traditional department divisions has led to a bench seat working environment – a version of ‘hot desking’ – with a communal approach to computer equipment. The firm reports a huge boost to productivity since the changes, with billings up 17% after nine months, compared with the previous year.
These shifts are being reflected in firms across LawNet, although change is at an early stage according to our research, which shows that only 15% of fee earners are using laptops, and the figures is almost non-existent for support functions. Similarly, in terms of remote working there is a huge variety in attitudes. In our research, the number of staff enabled for remote working ranged from 100% to just 1%.
Software
When we asked our firms how they are putting this hardware to work, customer-focussed case management and practice management systems were high on the agenda.
In today’s market, there are many high performance, integrated all-in-one solutions for practice, case and customer relationship management as such systems have shifted from the specialist sphere to become an essential part of the overall business strategy, for our firms at least. They can see that it’s a way of putting the client at the centre of things to ensure a consistently high quality experience.
At Harvey Ingram, they are about to implement a new practice and case management system to provide a unified system across their sites. “The final decision has yet to be made, but the most important thing is the lawyer interface and providing a familiar desktop to ease the transition,” says Tim Percival, “Also, we will look at the business processes such as expenses recording and time billing, to see how we can re-engineer them. There’s no sense in simply replicating old practices. It’s an opportunity to improve all round.”
But there’s a word of warning for those on the path to change from Mogers, having introduced a similar system in recent months. Says Treharne: “The financial investment is one small part. What we underestimated was the time we had to invest to get a system that truly satisfied our ambitions. It’s been tough, but now we have the right platform for the future, including our next step of going paperless.”
The paperless office is already well established at Fidler & Pepper in the East Midlands, where managing partner Mark Slade is also an accomplished software designer. One of the first firms in the country to embrace online solutions, they introduced a fully functioning online case management back in 1998 and have significantly updated since. According to Mark Slade, it’s been a game changer. “These IT developments have taken us from our roots, as a traditional high street firm, to become a bigger player, playing quite a different game.”
Web developments
Such innovations can indeed be a major differentiator in the online experience for customers, as this sphere of interaction becomes increasingly important. Gone are the days when you put a passive ‘who we are’ website online and promptly forgot about it. For every firm, it’s about how they can set themselves apart through a customer-focussed online presence.
At Vanderpump & Sykes in North London, their analytics showed that page views were increasingly being made on smartphones, so they developed a mobile version of the site, with large buttons, less text and simplified navigation.
For Mogers in Bath, their web presence has taken them into international markets, with a specialist expat offering, and they recently launched an iPhone App for employment law updates. But for managing partner Steven Treharne, what is most important is fronting the website with the real people that make up the firm. “We focus on relationship-driven advice and for our model to be successful post-LSA, we must have excellent people and they have to be front of house. Relationships are made ‘person to person’ and our website does not use clichéd photo stock images for that reason.”
Keeping things fresh is also vital. North West firm Cullimore Dutton totally restructured their web site last year with an improved content management interface to allow easier news updating and other content and have seen a boost in their Google search rankings as a result.
The firm is also making use of the Certainty wills register, one of LawNet’s package of online outsourced services to improve customer interaction. James Goddard, associate with Cullimore Dutton said: “This is a great opportunity to reach out to potential clients and a strong marketing opportunity with our existing client base, to offer the new service and ensure that they are up to date with their own wills.”
Online legal services
The delivery of online legal services is certainly growing, but the picture is still taking shape. It’s over a year since we signed an agreement with Direct Law’s Epoq service to offer their online drafting solutions to our member firms. At Mogers, the Epoq product is being considered as an internal resource, to enable more junior staff to follow a script. As Treharne says: “We can’t directly compete with the huge commoditised firms that are coming, nor do we want to. We’re a mid market firm and need to be focussed and play to our strengths, but we have to be conscious of the cost of production”
Elsewhere, other firms such as Breeze & Wyles are seeing good results and are planning to use the Epoq products online as a direct service for clients. Said Martyn Bateman: “We have been working on improving our website functionality for clients, such as the ability to complete wills and contracts directly through the website. A secure verification system is next, so that clients can access more of their data online.” Others are developing their own bespoke solutions. Harvey Ingram has devised a range of online products with added-value customer services wrapped around them, including a telephone helpline service. The firm reports good results for its most recent online employer product, which has attracted a number of interesting new clients.
Electronic CRM
The other important focus reported by firms is in customer communications – including email marketing – as they recognise the clear marketing advantages delivered by more sophisticated database content, as well as the right delivery solution.
Breeze & Wyles are looking at how to improve client communications with a news distribution system that links directly to the contact database. Nicholsons are weighing up the options for a CRM add-on for marketing communications, and at Mogers, the marketing plan for the coming year includes a bigger role for social networking.
“We tinker currently,” says Treharne. “We are looking at how customers want us to communicate with them. That may mean more email marketing, but we need to clean our data first, segment properly and fill in the gaps. It’s a big opportunity, but internal efficiencies need to drive developments, to give reliable data over time.”
Back at LawNet head office, an improved online presence is top of my list too. We are approaching the completion of a new internal network communications solution. It is effectively a country-wide intranet and will enable us to deliver training and document sharing, as well as the growing array of risk management tools we are developing for members. It will also extend the LawNet community online and it is a big project for us.
Alongside, I’m developing other services which I hope will helps firms to keep pace in the fast-shifting legal sector. These include serviced client satisfaction and performance benchmarking, and an online Learning Management System - something we hope to offer to enhance staff retention, training and compliance.
Whatever comes next, information technology looks set to be high on everyone’s agenda. As Harvey Ingram say: “Our route map equates to a significant investment for us over the next 18 months, but we’re confident we will see the right return.”