There needn't be trouble ahead

By Winscribe

This is an exciting time for law firms in the UK. '¨Whether a firm is entrenched in the traditional style or has embraced innovation in order to keep abreast of the changing market, the outcome is the same – there has '¨to be a wholesale change to the way law firms work.

Clients have an increasing awareness and level of choice these days about how they buy services and what they get for their money. Not surprisingly, heightened expectations also extend to legal services and how they are delivered.

Firms have to think outside their traditional boxes and offer more bespoke and flexible services in order to meet client demands or run the risk of losing business. It makes sense, therefore, that law firms take time to rethink in terms of their client expectations, offering a service to surpass that of their competitors.

It is no surprise that law firms are more likely to have commercial directors and senior managers running their practices nowadays rather than practicing lawyers. Law firms have to embrace marketing and client retention strategies, while at the same time satisfying the needs of new legal regulations, presenting a very different landscape to that of just a short time ago.

'¨Maintaining profitability amidst mounting fee pressures

Continued pressure on fees from clients was identified as the number one threat to law firm profitability by finance directors of the UK’s top 100 law firms, in a survey carried out by Sweet & Maxwell in 2011.¹ The global financial crisis was largely to blame, but the introduction of alternative business structures (ABSs) and the threat that they pose to traditional law firms has been a catalyst.

Firms are forced to look at ways that they can offer alternative fee structures to compete with non-traditional firms which, by offering highly systemised and cost-effective solutions, can offer far more competitive services. ABSs have demanded a wholesale change to the way that law firms work.

Jordan Furlong, a partner at Edge International said: “While law firms were built along old legal market value lines – authority, status, strength, power – these emerging companies are built along new legal market lines – speed, affordability, timeliness, ease of use.” ²

So, it makes sense that a leaf is taken out the modern approach and that more efficient and cost-effective processes are brought in to replace the old.

'¨Meeting the compliance burden without increasing costs

The introduction of outcomes-focused regulation (OFR) has focused law firms '¨on offering their clients a more quantifiable service, but proving compliance with the requirements set out in the Solicitors Regulation Authority Handbook is another challenge. It doesn’t help that the regulations are open to interpretation, which increases the risk of non-compliance, but also manually executing and monitoring the required processes is administratively burdensome, time consuming, costly and prone to '¨human error.

There are two types of approaches. Firstly, ‘plug the gap’, which aims to minimise change and utilise the manual workarounds or add (human) resources to deal with added reporting requirements and uncertainty. Secondly, some firms are seeing the new OFR as an opportunity to innovate and deliver added value to their client base, as well as their employees.

We know that, although the technology installed in law firms probably does the job that was intended, it tends to present as a set of solutions that stand alone and require manual intervention at several points during the process.

What legal firms are doing now is analysing the inefficiencies they have currently and introducing process automation for a variety of legal workflows such as client matter inception, file reviews and others. This automation relieves staff to concentrate on fee-earning activities rather than administrative ones. The added benefit of introducing mobile solutions allows lawyers to work where they need to be in order to maximise '¨their time.

Solutions exist that can automate reporting requirements, introduce audit trails straight into the process, reduce costs and ensure consistent outputs, '¨which leads to compliance.

Winscribe have been working with law firms in the UK to preserve their existing investments while introducing such solutions, as well as offering mobile applications to assist with increasing productivity on the move.

Check out our video on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ofwqd11_14 or call 01189 842133 and speak to '¨our legal team. alternatively, you can '¨email chartley@winscribe.com for '¨further information.

Footnotes: 

1. https://www.sweetandmaxwell.co.uk/about-us/press-releases/MDS0536.pdf

2. https://insidelegal.typepad.com/files/InsideLegalDigets_COLPM.pdf, page 6