Legal Technology Journal

How Wragge & Co LLP overcame the difficulties of bringing its diverse sources of information together using Handshake Software, and what the firm plans for the future.

Do you ever find yourself accessing several systems to find the information you want? And do the systems have different ways to retrieve information from them? You are not alone.

Information is the lifeblood of the modern law firm’s corporate body. Every activity and every output of the firm is dependent upon information, whether it’s about clients, precedents, matters, staffing, billing or ‘whatever’. The problem facing more and more law firms in this information-intensive age is simply the massive amount and complexity of the information that is now required to keep a firm going.

Handshake Software is a company that recognises this problem and specialises in helping many law firms overcome it. Its product collates and contextualises data from across the multiple software ‘silos’ and then helps to feed it out comprehensibly to users’ desktops.

Handshake Software works with established Microsoft technologies such as SharePoint or Outlook and other best-of-breed applications such as Worksite, InterAction, Hummingbird, Elite and Aderant to give users a single point of access into the firm’s information resources. Most importantly, rather than being organised according to which IT system it resides in, Handshake Software’s contextual understanding means it can reorganise data into law firm-friendly categories – for example by client, by matter, by partner or by jurisdiction.

Wragge & Co LLP

These capabilities were recognised and implemented by Wragge & Co LLP in a two-phase project between 2002 and 2006. The firm realised that its data silos were increasing in size and complexity and that the divisions between its DMS (which, at that time, was Hummingbird DOCSOpen), its Aderant PMS, its InterAction CRM and its own internal databases weren’t helping users to access information in an easily understandable way. The firm selected Handshake Software to help aggregate the data from across silos and to bring it together in a user-friendly manner.

Initially the data was used to create ‘e-mail detectives’, essentially small programs that looked at information as it flowed through the system and sent alerts when certain boundaries were approached or breached. Users could be alerted when matter budgets were exceeded, when a user wasn’t filing timesheets appropriately or when client service levels exceeded set limits. Another interesting use of the technology was when the firm took two different data sources (an internal directory and the PMS) and virtually ‘merged’ the data to display new information that couldn’t be created in any one system – for example, identifying individuals within groups that only existed in the internal directory and flagging when they improperly created time entries into the PMS for matters where those people should not be entering time due to service-level agreements with the clients. Wragge & Co refers to this ‘e-mail detective’ as ‘Team Creep’ and the approach taken has been hugely useful to the firm, which now has over 200 ‘e-mail detectives’. Setting these up using the firm’s traditional reporting methods and existing resources would have required each report to have been written, generated and distributed in 11 seconds!

Phase two of the project was to create a comprehensive client-centric portal based on Microsoft SharePoint. The portal presents lawyers with access to aggregated client data from the firm’s diverse information silos via a dashboard, enabling them and their support staff to get a holistic view of all the information stored on a key client. This has created some significant opportunities for the firm – for example, using the system to identify cross-selling opportunities with existing clients by bringing together information stored in the CRM and PMS databases. Handshake’s software has enabled the firm to identify the opportunities and then automatically present them to the lawyers via the dashboard.

Wragge & Co now plans to extend the solution in an x-centric portal. This will mean that lawyers will be able to have quick and simple access to aggregated information in several key business contexts. They will, for example, be able to view critical business information about a key client's matters, in terms of a practice area, an industry sector and office. Wragge & Co is also going to be distributing content via Handshake through the additional communication channel of RSS feeds. This will mean that lawyers will have the ability to ‘subscribe’ to relevant, consolidated business information that they want to see without even leaving their inbox! 

Liam Flanagan is a director and Tikit founder.