U.K. Law Firm Modernizes Legal Forms
2 min read
SITUATION
• Paperwork after courtroom or police station visits took time away from client service
• Manual processes caused delays in billing and case completion
• Compliance and governance practices added time and burden of manual tasks on employees
RESULTS
• Less time spent on manual routing of information and data entry
• Faster, more responsive client service
• Increased accountability and transparency across the firm
• Reduction in administrative costs
A general practice law firm located in the United Kingdom offers a broad range of services across many types of U.K. law — such as crime, personal injury, property, and commercial — and needed a way to create clear accountability and support compliance for each litigator’s daily activities.
Helping Firm-wide Compliance
Prior to using Laserfiche, lawyers would fill out a 40-page form after courtroom or police station visits, creating a cumbersome and time-consuming process for both the lawyers and clients, as well as delays in billing and case completion.
“The compliance wasn’t there and the money wasn’t there,” said the firm’s operations manager. “The starting point for us was to deal with that particular issue of ensuring that when someone went to the police station, the paperwork actually got to us and got to us on time, instead of two weeks later.”
Laserfiche’s advanced electronic forms capabilities were an attractive solution for improving processing times and creating compliance controls. The company selected Laserfiche to bring information accessibility and accountability to the firm’s client and administrative processes.
Taking the Leg Work Out of Legal Work
The firm began by implementing mobile forms within its Crime and Litigation Department. With Laserfiche Forms, litigators can now use iPads to immediately capture and update client information at police stations or courtrooms, then instantly send the information to the firm’s administrative department for end-to-end processing. Forms-based workflow and analytics automatically track litigators’ court attendances and time reporting, simplifying accountability and providing more accurate data for billing.
“Laserfiche gave us a fantastic vehicle for that,” said the operations manager. “The Laserfiche system could capture information from the client, which is more and more important from a data protection point of view now. There was accountability. Things weren’t just going to disappear.”
Benefits include:
- Solicitors can instantly and accurately capture client information on mobile devices.
- Client paperwork is automatically sent from lawyers to administrative teams for processing.
- Offline access to documents helps solicitors address client needs on the fly.
- Police station visits, court attendances and litigator timecards are automatically tracked, creating more accurate and transparent reporting.
- Administrative costs in the company’s Crime department were reduced.
“Laserfiche looks after all the typical elements of what a lawyer does,” added the operations manager. “That’s been the biggest breakthrough for us as a practice, and the most spectacular application of it for the firm as a whole.”