Legal Technology Journal

What benefits can a firm expect to see from deploying a constantly evolving next-generation practice management system?

Twenty years ago, law firms were purely professional practices with lawyers viewed in the same manner as doctors and the firms they worked for as surgeries. The focus was on providing the best advice to clients, the number of partners very rarely topped 20 and even the most ambitious management tools tended to focus on profit and loss or profit per equity partner. As increased merger and acquisition activity creates complex, multinational, multi-specialist global law firms, the need to take stock, measure return on investment and hone strategy based on quantitative measurements has become key to success.

Ultimately, the objective for any firm is to maximise profitability without sacrificing the quality of client service. In order to achieve this, key performance indicators and benchmarking exercises are prevalent, even in boutique firms. Metrics include the number of active clients, work in progress, high-profit clients, practice area performance and the number of billable hours are all of importance to making management decisions. By comparing these statistics with past behaviour, peer-group performance from competing firms and future objectives, a firm’s stakeholders, including future employees and clients, can gauge its success. Key to this information gathering exercise is the speed of collection and response. Timely, malleable and user friendly information obtained differentiates a more nimble organisation. With an increasingly commoditised legal market and the Legal

Services Act looming, it is probably only a matter of time before we see the first UK law firm float on the stock market. Twenty years from now, law firm management may be synonymous with large enterprise management, so the foundations for successful management should be laid in place today. With that in mind, firms are paying ever closer attention to the technology they deploy not only to ensure value to the operational efficiency of the business, but to assist with delivering high-quality differential services to their clients.

The Axxia DNA approach of surrounding a legal business process management (BPM) platform with a range of functionspecific modules is designed to provide a complete business view, with no need for the management and support of thirdparty products. In this way, DNA aims to tame the complexities of the modern law firm by ensuring smooth, efficient workflows. This is achieved through the Workflow Modelling Studio, a process management engine that enables any firm to design, adapt and deploy workflows to manage all legal and non-legal activities in a way that best suits the nuances of individual firms. In turn, this enables them to offer their clients a more complete and efficient service.

When Minter Ellison SA/NT agreed to test-lab Axxia’s DNA practice and case management solution in the Adelaide and Darwin offices, we were keen to find the right application to underpin the firm’s future growth. It is key to our strategy for growth that we consistently seek to develop and use new ways of improving the efficiency and quality of the services we provide to our clients. Our current Axxia system has delivered the firms requirements as a practice and case management system but we were keen to measure the suitability of DNA as an advanced technology that could serve as the core technical application to underpin our future business strategy and customer service offerings. After some discussion with Axxia’s MD, Stuart Holden, I was delighted to take the opportunity to conduct a full evaluation of DNA in an intensive two-week technical review lab.

Best-practice approach

Many clients who come to us are looking for a best-practice approach and solution, and have heard of our reputation both for excellent risk mitigation and for handling work quickly and effectively. As director of innovation, I regard my job as being relatively straightforward: to give our fee-earners and support staff the resources they need to do their jobs in the most efficient and effective way possible. This means not only constantly delivering full value to our clients through the quality of our advice, but doing so in the simplest, most direct and hassle-free way we can.

Choice and flexibility

There were two particular reasons for my interest. First, DNA is webbased, giving our authorised users throughout the firm far more choice and flexibility over when, where and how they use the system. Secondly, I was intrigued by the prospect of a legal practice management system which was driven by an application-wide BPM engine. Previous case management based workflow system implementations have returned efficiency and risk management benefits at a transactional/matter level. I believe extension of the BPM methodology throughout the hierarchy of the full practice management system (PMS) will enable us to tailor our operational systems more extensively to specific client needs, helping us automate more and more of our operational systems. In the past we have struggled with the best way to tackle these issues. In future, I would like to look to DNA as a gateway for us to collaborate with our clients – providing access to the necessary documentation and further information on how they should use precedents whilst ensuring potential risks have been mitigated. I am keen to work with Axxia to develop a secure infrastructure that will allow clients to access DNA itself and create a practical and realistic licensing model for such client users.

These thoughts were all before we conducted the extended test. Now, having been intensively involved in the process, I have been able to refine my views on Axxia DNA into a number of areas, including its most useful functionality and the technical advantages it brings to our firm.

First, though, I should stress that I believe the BPM-driven approach has important and valuable implications for the practice of law. I realise that that is a broad statement, so I will explain. What I found in DNA was a move from a primarily accounts-driven practice management system with some used case management features, to a process driven, enterprise-wide work automation and records storage platform, with integrated client relationship management (CRM) and document management functionality.

A shift in focus

What this does is shift a firm’s focus from simply time-recording and billing towards its general operational practices. Time-recording and billing are clearly important, but they do not represent the core reasons why a law firm is in business – in my view, our legal practice management systems should be focused on how we do what we charge for. In other words, it is about efficiency and the consistent delivery of quality: it is not so much about bean counting as about content delivery and service outcomes.

It also has a fundamental impact on the way that fee-earners work. Instead of moving between different ‘siloed’ areas, the BPM workflow tool guides them swiftly and efficiently through and across a single integrated system with all the legal-specific, administrative, accounting, reporting and other functionality they need to do their job. For example, writing a letter may generate a prompt to issue a bill or add new contact details to the firm’s CRM database. It provides us with a framework where every task can lead to the next – irrespective as to whether those tasks relate to matter-based transactional work, or billing, or CRM – helping us to eradicate any risk of missing a step or forgetting a job, and enabling lawyers to concentrate on generating value rather than non-productive administrative tasks.

That’s the big picture. On a rather more detailed level, the outstanding benefit of DNA is that a graphical, flowchart design tool – a fairly standard BPM design interface – resides in an existing practice-management hierarchical data structure. This means that the configuration of firm-specific workflows and process management is pleasingly straightforward, with no need to worry about constructing an operational framework that fits into your existing file/storage system – it already exists. I noticed benefits at the ‘traditional’ matter-based case management level too. The old ‘lock-down’ of workflows to matter level could sometimes be a drawback, as it was limited to case plans (and only single workflows at that). However, with DNA the problem seems to be substantially solved by the extension of workflows through client/entity records and files/matters, and the ability to create multiple workflows at file/matter level.

Joined-up thinking

In addition, Axxia appears to have been responsible for some excellent joined-up thinking about how file and sub-file workflows interact with data from clients/entities. The ability to use and to pass data back and forth through different levels of the system hierarchy will be enormously useful. This is because it allows sub-file workflows to use core matter or client/entity role information, enabling workflows to be conditional on client variations in a far more structured and scaleable way than has been possible previously.

This was not the only improvement I saw over legacy systems and other solutions currently available on the market. I have identified the next ‘top five’, which I am listing here in order of usefulness:

• First, I would highlight DNA’s built-in CRM entity file systems. These treat the management of the client relationship, and all data relating to it, in a consistent way to matters/workflow management. I will return to CRM and some potential future developments that I would like to see.
• Second, and critical to the overall use of the system, the web browser really delivered. As we had hoped, it promises to give us tremendous flexibility, including the ability to add content easily to a user’s desktop.
• Third, because all aspects of the practice management system set up should be sufficiently straightforward to allow us to concentrate on content rather than technical complexities.
• Fourth, DNA allows good diary/task integration with Outlook. We believe that this will be enormously helpful for task allocation and workflow-driven job scheduling. In many ways, this is at the heart of the advantages that DNA delivers, allowing fee-earners to concentrate on delivering the services that deliver value to our clients and improve our bottom line.
• Fifth, DNA contains an excellent built-in document management capability, far better than anything we have seen before as part of a BPM or case management product. This has the capability to add significantly to the efficiency and ease of scanning, filing, storing and retrieving all documentation, streamlining our operations across the firm.

Future development

In terms of future development, I am very much looking forward to seeing where Axxia take DNA in terms of its CRM capabilities. Currently, most CRM in law firms is still about driving mailing campaigns and events management. In my view, that is marketing rather than true CRM. I believe that there is huge potential for driving genuine CRM, adding value to every facet of the client relationship through facilitating interactivity between client and entity data/record-keeping and matter- level workflow-driven tools.

This enables a truly systematic approach to managing ongoing client relationships, both through the provision of greater visibility for users of what we do and have done for every client, and being able to incorporate client-specific protocols and procedures into all the work we do.

For full-service commercial firms in particular, I see this as being very significant. If all we do as lawyers is to manage matters, then we’re nothing but glorified clerks. Trusted business advisers know their clients inside out and partner with them. Naturally, no IT system will do this for you – but any platform that at least supports a genuinely client-centric operational infrastructure has to be an enormously important enabling resource.

While we have not yet rolled DNA out to the firm, we are looking to do so over the course of the next year and are waiting on our peers in the UK to finish their implementations before we begin the process. The investigation project has identified areas that Axxia can develop the DNA product.

We are working with Axxia on developing a strategic plan that will support an implementation of DNA, alongside the official Australian launch of the technology. Once implemented, we will continue to look for opportunities to use DNA to deliver services to our clients and to use the technology as a key strategic differentiator.

Ian Thomson is director of innovation at Minter Ellison SA/NT.