Integrating IT and law: A KM case study from Donns Solicitors

As law firms continue to search for ways to capitalise on knowledge, they find that the greatest challenges are related to organisational structure, creating the right culture and their technology, issues that need to be addressed if a firm is to achieve significant growth and maintain its personal touch. Hilary Meredith, managing partner at Donns Solicitors, looks at why the firm embarked on its knowledge-management programme, how it has developed and the challenges ahead.

Having made the decision to focus entirely on personal injury law, we quickly realised that effective knowledge management could help to provide a competitive edge to drive our organisation to sustainable growth and profit.

Knowledge management (KM) has traditionally been strongest among the pharmaceutical, government, and professional services sectors but, in more recent years, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, communications, consumer products and utilities industries have adopted the KM concept. It is also gradually becoming an accepted and widely respected part of legal practice business strategies.

It is widely recognised that the main reasons companies embark on knowledge-management projects are for improving customer services, growing revenue and profit and retaining key talent and expertise. Donns was no exception although not necessarily in that order.

We felt that it was not possible to achieve the full benefits from knowledge management unless individuals within the firm were willing and motivated to share their knowledge or unless we lost our structural rigidity to permit information and knowledge flow. We soon adapted our management structure so that there are now 13 partners (nine of which are women) as well as a management team comprising senior partner, Raymond Donn, the firm’s director of finance, a director of quality, another partner Paul Ackroyd and myself. This team meets once a month to review statistics and make the day-to-day decisions on the running of the practice. The management team, which is unusual for a law firm, reports back to the partners at their quarterly meeting.

Donns has also created a director level that includes a director of claims, quality, finance, marketing and operations, and IT. Each department has a section head, head of department and partner in charge. The system is more akin to an insurance-type industry rather than a traditional solicitors office and operates on a typical plc like structure.

Donns success and growth over the past few years has been largely due to developing its technology while encouraging a complete change of working culture and practice to achieve an effective knowledge-sharing work environment.

Streamlining systems for growth and dispensing with the “shroud of secrecy”

Through implementing a KM strategy, our main objectives were to ensure that every client’s rehabilitation was prioritised to improve customer service to individual and corporate clients, enhance our management information, speed up the claims process and make it more cost efficient. We also wanted to dispense with the air of secrecy that shrouds the legal profession.

In July 2000, Donns embarked on a strategy to enable the firm to maximise growth while ensuring that we didn’t lose our personal touch. Donns launched e-file-access, using internet-based technology designed to enhance Donns’s customer service for clients that make a personal injury claim; quite simply, it gives clients bringing legal claims open access to their case file via the internet.

The e-file-access system dispenses with the air of secrecy that frustrates many law firm clients. It provides a solution that enables clients to regularly obtain information relating to the progress of their claim and ensures that Donns maintains a high level of customer service both for its insurance partners and individual clients. This is particularly vital in view of the fact that Donns’s client base has increased by 600 per cent in the last five years.

Few legal firms have tried to follow our lead perhaps because of the significant investment required. Other firms are scared of allowing clients to have open access to their files and papers. Opening files to clients in such a transparent way has not been without its downside; we have had to ensure that all our staff are fully trained on the internet, files are updated within 24 hours and staff spelling and grammar improved through external training.

The technology – integrating IT and law

To ensure that the project was successful Donns appointed an IT director to the board, Manda Tiernan. Tiernan and her team worked alongside the management team, partners and claims handlers to build a system that was functional and helpful for their everyday use and for clients alike.

The result is a site that is designed to be simple and easy to navigate around. Throughout the design and development phase, a core objective has been to ensure that the service is customer friendly and as informative as possible to visitors, who are anxious to see their claim resolved as quickly as possible and are seeking peace of mind that it is being dealt with professionally. E-file-access is aimed at and available to all clients that make a personal injury claim.

The information contained within each individual’s “e-file” is updated every 24 hours to ensure that the client can log on and obtain an up-to-the-minute view of exactly what is happening with their claim. The nature of the information provided via e-file-access is obviously highly confidential and Donns has employed stringent security measures to safeguard clients’ private files. All clients are allocated a unique password and username. E-file-access is based on Citrix thin-client technology and uses the programming languages of Visual Basic and C. The application is accessed by a firewalled, secure link from the Donns website, www.donnslaw.co.uk, based on a web server at a remote site, via additional secure applications at Donns to a dedicated server. For back up, the application copies overnight parts of the live data held in Donns’s case-management system into a SQL server. The application uses a combination of SQL, Visual Basic and C to interrogate the data in order to present it in a window within the website (portal) in a similar format to the way the data is presented within the case-management system on Donns’s own users’ desktops.

In addition, the application is also able to access the data of any documents that Donns has issued to clients so that they can then print the document on their own local printer.

E-file-access comprises two main applications: one to enable individual clients to access their own case details and the other to enable corporate clients to access their own set of files, and to audit individual files within their own set.

Donns recognises that, as a new concept, the system is open to enhancement and actively encourages feedback from customers as a means to continually improve its service. The way in which the system has been configured within a Citrix environment means that it can be updated regularly.

The development of e-file-access has enabled us to ensure that our resources, both in terms of people and financial, are focused on progressing claims as swiftly as possible. This is achieved by encouraging clients to check progress online in the first instance, rather than call with a query that may be easily resolved without necessitating telephone contact.

The project was designed with its potential for future development in mind. It was developed as a scaleable system to accommodate growth; up-to-date programming languages were used in the development of the application to ensure that developers could continue to be accessed. Flexibility has been designed into the application so that it can be readily adapted to other methods of application design.

To provide a more efficient service for clients injured in RTAs, Donns opened its accident- management centre in 2001, operating on behalf of a number of insurance clients. The centre, handling 30,000 plus cases annually, provides an integrated claims service, eliminating the need for motorists to deal with several separate organisations, thus speeding up the claims process by up to 30 per cent.

The success of e-file-access has meant that the total time spent on each case has significantly reduced and so, therefore, have the fees. We have responded to this by focusing on improving our client service, a long-term strategy that has reaped greater rewards than merely focusing on fee income per case.

Is it a success?

If Donns’s aim was to obtain competitive edge to drive the firm into sustainable growth and profit then the answer has to be yes.

As a result of its KM programme, Donns’s performance can be monitored against target levels to ensure that every client is receiving the best in terms of claims progress, advice and rehabilitation. Since the programme was introduced, Donns has settled over £65m in personal injury claims on behalf of its clients. The firm has also doubled in size to nearly 300 staff and 13 partners and was the only law firm to appear in the Financial Time’s Inner City 100 top firms for growth in 2001.

E-file-access has been very successful. Since its launch in July 2000, it has received on average 1,200 visitors per month, many of which have been outside office hours, for example, visitors have been recorded checking their files at 3am. The success has also been measured by the number of calls taken by the claims handlers and solicitors, which has reduced, as has the length of time it takes for claims to be resolved.

Ready for the challenges ahead?

The recent announcement that an agreement has been reached with regards to fixed fee for road traffic claims will be of great benefit to those lawyers who are efficient. I am certain that it will also highlight those solicitors that have purposely not invested in technology so as to increase their level of costs.

The agreement in principle reached by APIL, The Law Society, MASS and Representatives of the Insurers will see the introduction of fixed fees for RTA claims with a value under £10,000, which are settled without the need for proceedings to be commenced. The deal means that many claimant solicitors will have to sacrifice their current level of fees for predictability and speed of payment. Although the fees agreed are less than the national average, I am delighted with the agreement. It creates certainty with regards to the level of costs and is fantastic news for both insurers and lawyers.

Donns has invested a vast amount in developing its technology to ensure that its claims service runs at optimum efficiency. There are firms out there that have a high level of average fees due to the calculated lack of investment in technology, enabling firms to build up a large paper file and clock many hours by doing the work manually.

They is no place for such lawyers in tomorrow's claims scene. It will also herald the departure of some claims farmers that have hijacked claims and then “sold” them back to desperate lawyers for extortionate fees. Sometimes called “investigation fees”, claims farmers have suggested that lawyers treat these as a dressed up marketing fee and include the sum in the solicitors profit costs. This in itself will strengthen the existing legal-expense market.

This is the first and a major step to ridding the industry of many companies that have seen the claims market as a quick opportunity to make rich pickings to the detriment of others. Once they have been flushed out, then those of us from both sides of the fence that have long-term pride in the claims industry can settle back to achieve what is a common goal – a fair settlement for a genuine claim, achieved as quickly as possible. Hopefully now that day is not too far off.

Hilary Meredith is managing partner at Donns Solicitors, Manchester. She can be contacted on 0161 834 3311 or at: lawyers@donnslaw.co.uk.