Are you getting the most out of your IT system?

I looked at how firms can gain a competitive advantage through IT, either by building bespoke systems or by investing beyond the purchase price of new systems.

For those firms that may not have the means to invest, or have already made a series of strategic investments, there are still ways to eke out advantages, enhance efficiencies, and therefore help that all-important bottom line.

Subtle join

The vast majority of law firms will be running Microsoft Office as their document production tool of choice and will also have a practice management system (PMS) of some sort. These two products are often integrated
to some extent, so that, for example, a Word billing template is integrated with extracts from the PMS time records in order to put some automation into your invoice routine. This subtle join between two systems has a huge amount of scope.

Practice management systems are based predominantly on industry-standard database systems, which means that firms can use a variety of tools to extract and interact with them. This flexibility is exploited via reporting tools for information extraction and analytics. On the input side, systems such as cost recovery can be integrated to send in data directly, and integration with document management systems provides for matter-centric working practices.

All of this is useful stuff and,
for larger firms, more or less essential. However, there is much more that can be done to exploit the data that core systems hold.

One thing that is often overlooked is integration with Microsoft Office products for more sophisticated document production. Microsoft Office is underpinned by a powerful programming language (called VBA) that can be manipulated into a more or less infinite variety of ways to assist with document automation.

This could be something straightforward like a simple letter template that integrates with an existing contacts list to speed up basic document production. Or it could be much more sophisticated, for example, a template that can extract data from core systems, analyse it on the fly and build complex legal documents instantly.

Of course, this functionality
is not ready out-of-the box with Office products, it needs to be specifically coded in each case. That, of course, means investing money in specialists who can undertake this work.

Business case

This expense can be off-putting initially, but when a business case is made, and you start to analyse the potential for efficiency gains, there is much to be said for it.

Imagine being able to automatically produce a
joint venture agreement, immediately after the initial
data has been fed into the practice management system
for a client.

Compare that in terms of fee earner time to working through and marking up a standard precedent and it’s fairly easy to see the efficiency gains this could bring, especially when you apply it to a range of what would normally be time-consuming document builds. As increasing numbers of legal transactions become fixed price, this kind
of automation becomes more important.

This kind of progress can initially seem quite threatening
to lawyers, as the inference is that it will erode their work. In reality
it will, but not entirely, as their expertise would be used to ensure that the output from
such systems is correct, making
it a move from drafting to
quality checking.

We have seen this happen
with transactional law over the last few years, and more and more of it will creep in. The question is, are you going to be in or out when it happens?

One of the positives in this scenario is that all of this can be done without any additional investment in software systems or software training, as you would be using products you already own and are skilled in.

The key is using your imagination to think of the things you could process engineer by connecting existing systems. But it is also about being able to plan strategically for how your firm is going to react to ever-increasing market forces, and how you use technology to drive that strategy.

It’s not just about buying
the latest systems and hoping they do the trick, it’s about understanding your processes and being innovative about mapping technology to them. SJ

Damian Blackburn is director of legal IT consultancy firm SLFtech