Legal Technology Journal

Mike Burton discusses how Cripps Harries Hall is harnessing leading-edge technology to enhance close collaboration with clients and peers as well as underpinning the firm’s client-focused approach.

Cripps Harries Hall LLP is a full-service firm operating out of Tunbridge Wells. With nearly 300 employees, the firm provides a wide range of legal services. Although its core strengths include a healthy private client practice, Cripps Harries Hall focuses on corporate work, and has a national reputation in relation to real estate and commercial property work. The practice has grown significantly over the past five years.

Unusually for a mid-sized regional firm, Cripps Harries Hall is ranked in the top tier by both Chambers and Legal 500 in several categories, and commended for ‘hitting above its weight’. IT director, Mike Burton, and his small, highly-qualified team are recognised for harnessing leading-edge technology to create innovative systems and applications that underpin the firm’s commitment to delivering excellent client service and expanding the business. Achieving value for money is a key con-sideration and Burton underlines the importance of squeezing the maximum return out of every IT project. ‘As a regional firm, our turnover, and therefore our funding, is about half that of a London firm and that puts serious constraints on our IT budget,’ he says. ‘We also need board level approval for all projects. So we put a lot of effort into developing innovative, cost-effective solutions that produce tangible benefits for us and our clients.’

Client extranets

The twin drivers of client focus and value for money have produced a succession of client-facing IT projects. For example, extranets provide clients with direct and secure electronic access to key information. This technology is used extensively to support volume transactions, such as providing debt recovery services for landlords. ‘When we’re dealing with a couple of thousand debt recoveries a month for a client, they find it extremely useful to see exactly what stage has been reached in regard to all the matters we are handling for them via an extranet service,’ explains Burton.

Burton has been developing client extranets for some years both at Cripps Harries Hall and at his previous firm, Lawrence Graham. He explains that the underlying technology is relatively straightforward because each extranet deals with a separate topic or client. ‘It easy to take a generic document management service, twist it and make information available to third parties to facilitate auctions, for example,’ he says, ‘But extranets have moved well beyond document delivery. As well as providing a secure and flexible platform for handling complex matters for clients with huge property portfolios involving a large number of legal documents such as title deeds and leases, extranets are regularly used for document delivery, case management and electronic billing and advice. The term “extranet” is no longer sufficient to describe what law firms are doing for their clients.’

Professional partners and referrers network

In late 2007, Cripps Harries Hall combined the extranet principle with the firm’s internal knowledge and know-how systems with the launch of its professional partners and referrers network (PPRN). This is a hosted network that was established with the aim of sharing knowledge and expertise with other law firms in the South East, developing peer contacts and generating business by way of referrals.

Ed Weeks, partner in charge of PPRN, explains that although it has an extranet element in terms of know-how and knowledge, it has a very different focus. ‘PPRN is about community first and about extranet probably fifth,’ he says. ‘We included the know-how element in order to support other smaller regional law firms who may lack our resources. The intention is to create a genuine resource for these other firms and provide a forum in which the resources of like-minded firms can be pooled. While these firms are, to an extent, competitors, they also have interests in common as traditional firms of solicitors come under threat from increased regulation and the opening up of the market for legal services. This is not entirely altruistic on Cripps Harries Hall’s part. We benefit from increased referrals, for example where another firm is conflicted out or does not have the required specialist knowledge, and also increase awareness of our brand in the legal community.’

Cripps Harries Hall is known for providing an excellent training ground for new lawyers. This is reflected in a positive alumni network. ‘We train people who then move on, typically to London firms which offer higher rewards,’ explains Burton. ‘We’re seen as a stepping stone, and we get good feedback from our alumni in London firms – and those that work with them – that we have given them solid foundations to build on. This has given us a strong reputation among other law firms for being the lawyer’s lawyer.’ He adds that because lawyers feel that they have had good training at Cripps Harries Hall, they are happy to refer matters back to the firm after they move on. ‘That social network that often facilitates the portability of legal work between law firms. Not only do people recommend their previous firm, but they are happy to refer work to others that they trained with.’

Cripps Harries Hall recognised this some 18 months ago when they established a hosted website for alumni. However, Burton emphasises that PPRN has a different and distinct objective from alumni. ‘Alumni assumes that there is already a relationship, whereas PPRN is creating a much more flexible community that draws people in on the basis of sharing knowledge,’ he says.

Realising the concept

Burton explains how PPRN works. ‘It doesn’t have to be expensive,’ he says. ‘PPRN is based on an externally hosted website. We used Pipex which costs only £500 a year, but that provides a web server and nothing more. We then needed a framework and we found a product called Joomla, a PHP application that will run on the web server and provide the web pages that you see when you visit the website. A lot of the website is content – information that we put in. The community will soon be able to add to it as well and that’s when the site starts taking on a life of its own.’

Keeping the content fresh and new is top priority. ‘This is where the Joomla package assists us,’ says Burton. ‘You can add various components to improve and develop the tools that it delivers. For example we have included RSS feeds, so that articles from our website and other websites can be categorised and added to the relevant forums. News areas include up-todate salient information for consumption by the community. The idea is to maintain the vibe by constantly adding new, dynamic content.’

At the moment, PPRN interfaces with the firm’s internal systems only to the extent that content from Cripps Harries Hall’s website is used to populate the site via RSS feeds. The plan is to develop tighter integration in terms of know-how and include more tools and training materials. This will be guided by the membership. ‘We know exactly who’s using what service,’ explains Burton. ‘PPRN already offers its members information and tools, including applications that carry out calculations around leases, rentals and loans.’

Unusually, Cripps Harries Hall plans to expand PPRN to include other professionals who have input into its key practice areas. ‘It isn’t focused purely on the legal profession, although our initial target membership consisted of lawyers with regional law firms in the South East. We’re keen to evolve and grow the community by involving accountants and surveyors – other disciplines that are attached to the legal processes we handle – so potentially PPRN has a broad spectrum,’ adds Burton.

A client-focused structure and strategy

Cripps Harries Hall’s outward facing IT strategy reflects the firm’s dedication to its clients. In May 2005, the firm realigned its entire structure to become entirely client focused. ‘Because our business is sharply focused on client delivery, we established separate departments for private client work, corporate property work, corporate generic work and litigation. We also moved away from the traditional practice area set-up by creating specific departments that reflect our client base. These include public sector clients, property developers, charities as well as professional partners and limited liability partnerships,’ explains Burton. ‘In many respects, PPRN is an extension of that ethos. We realised that by aligning ourselves more directly with our clients’ needs we can extend our services within the community too and bring in more clients too.’

How does this external focus interface with the firm’s internal IT strategy? ‘Our internal IT strategy focuses on continual renewal, maintaining the flexibility to accommodate new business demands as they arise,’ says Burton. ‘Our system is divided into four silos: communications, document generation, practice management and a catch-all of other which encompasses internal systems such as HR, and records management. We have deliberately created a degree of separation between them in order to deliver resilience and performance. If we have a system failure in one area, only some 25% of our fee-earners and clients will be affected, rather than 75% or even 100%. For that reason we’re hesitant to opt for a completely integrated system. We keep our system integration at the web level in order to deliver effective web services to meet business demands.’

Burton explains how it works using bulk litigation support as an example. ‘We started with an extranet that could deliver documents. We then linked it to our document management, case management and practice management systems so that clients could access all their information. The documents come from the DMS and bills and so on from the PMS. We pull the three separate systems together at web level and present that as an extranet service in a complete, integrated form. So our IT strategy creates a very flexible platform for client service.’

Building on headline products

Burton and his team build bespoke applications that integrate with headline products used by most London law firms. These include the Thomson Elite PMS and InterAction CRM system. Cripps Harries Hall is also continuing to get good value out of its Open Text DMS. Burton explains: ‘We have considered mov ing to iManage, Interwoven or EMC Documentum. But because we’ve developed a lot of our own systems and applications, we are still making very good use of the Open Text product. While we can cope with upgrades relatively easily, if we were to move to an alternative DMS, not only would we have to convert all our documents, but we’d also have to re-engineer a lot of development work that links our DMS with our intranet and extranets.’

Enhanced integrated communication

Cripps Harries Hall’s virtualised and converged IP telephony system using Extreme and Mitel technologies has enhanced client communication, ensuring that incoming calls are quickly routed to the right person and facilitating remote and mobile working. Burton is now working on developing further seamless integration between the InterAction CRM system and the telephone systems. ‘We’re introducing new applications such as screen popping – a technology used by banks and call centres’ says Burton. ‘When a client calls, their caller ID is automatically displayed. An integrated, converged voice and data system means that their telephone number can be used to link into the CRM system. Even if the user is not in the office, they can access the system via Citrix and link into InterAction, Elite and Docs.

All relevant documents and correspondence relating to a matter – including a client’s billing details – can be accessed in just a couple of clicks. The idea is that when a client calls, the person who takes the call immediately has everything they need at their fingertips to provide the best possible service,’ he adds. ‘At the moment we have the underlying platform that we need and we’re doing web development work internally to tie everything together. We use a particular application to link the PCs to the telephone system. We’re now launching from that into our intranet to provide that information seamlessly so that within about three seconds of receiving a call, it’s possible to see all the documents that have been created for that client’.

A creative approach boosts the brand

Burton and his team handle a lot of the technical work in-house. Although this approach was initially driven by budgetary constraints, it has proved extremely successful, delivering an excellent return on investment and boosting the firm’s reputation as an innovator in legal IT. In 2002, Cripps Harries Hall’s intranet, Purple Pages, won the best use of IT award at Gleneagles. Purple Pages has evolved over the past five years and now integrates tightly with Elite, InterAction and Docs to provide an immediate holistic view of the business on a client-by-client basis.

Burton ascribes Cripps Harries Hall’s creative approach to IT to the quality of his team. ‘We have a small IT team of only ten supporting 300 people,’ he says. ‘However, three of the team are Microsoft Certified Systems Engineers qualified so we can run our own structure very well. We’re Microsoft focused, typically using HP hardware, so we can create servers very readily and make sure they’re stable and perform well. The ability to do that in-house is a significant advantage. Our core servers are virtualised and we are one of the few law firms running virtualised Elite. We find ourselves pushing suppliers to do things in the latest and greatest way to develop applications that fit into the systems we build. Our technical excellence enables us to work symbiotically with suppliers deliver the best results. It comes back to a determination to achieve the best possible return on investment while managing our systems as efficiently and effectively as possible.’ This means creating a system that is flexible, scalable and as easy as possible to maintain.

Burton considers his major triumphs to be the Purple Pages, the client extranets and PPRN and there are more projects in the pipeline for 2008. Burton and his team are once again looking to other industries for cutting-edge equipment. ‘We’re currently looking at dual and triple screen machines,’ he says. ‘Samsung has released a USB monitor that’s extremely popular in financial organisations, but hasn’t yet caught on in law firms. Having a second screen means that a lawyer could have document A on one screen and document B on the other, making it easier to draft and revise documents. Because it only requires a USB connection it also works with laptops.’

The paperless challenge

Despite his clear commitment to cutting-edge technology, Burton has not been convinced to attempt to switch Cripps Harries Hall to the paperless office. ‘Some studies on this have found that trying to push firms to paperless matters can actually increase paper consumption,’ he observes. ‘This is because people will still print their own copies of documents and keep them to themselves. So you end up with several paper copies when there shouldn’t be any.’ Furthermore, moving to a paperless office would require considerable extra investment in equipment. ‘Although we have very good document generation, scanning can still be complicated. We can scan documents up to A3 so that we can put floor plans on a client extranet to help a property client, but most of our clients do not require this facility,’ explains Burton. ‘Although everything we produce is held electronically; our lawyers regularly deal with paper from third parties. We either scan it into our DMS, or just use the paper file. As long as the lawyer has that to hand, they can sit at any desk in any of our offices or even work remotely as we have virtualised PCs and phones.’

Making the upgrade

Burton and his team devote a significant amount of their time to keeping the firm’s systems healthy and upgraded. Having just completed an Elite upgrade, the next project is to move to a newer version of InterAction. Document management is another key focus area and in the next few months Cripps Harries Hall will be looking to install the latest version of Open Text. Burton emphasises that keeping the firm’s systems at the cutting edge and ensuring that PPRN and other client-facing applications remain vital, live and updated involves a lot of maintenance. ‘We have online services to maintain and improve. We get new clients and we have to look at providing services to them. So we work hand in hand with the business to deliver those services as required. Our alumni website is very extensive with several hundred pages of content and another website is dedicated to business continuity,’ he says. Burton and his team are constantly creating innovative new systems, and their biggest challenge is finding the time to maintain them. There’s no rest for the creative!

Mike Burton is the IT director at Cripps Harries Hall LLP.