Case study: Assessing portal potential

Birmingham-based law firm Wragge & Co takes pride in using IT to connect effectively with clients. With some 110 partners and over 400 qualified staff, a solution combining strong simplicity with data consolidation was an essential investment.

By Andy Stokes, IT manager, Wragge & Co

Wragge & Co LLP looks to technology to facilitate good client relationships. The firm’s IT infrastructure provides professionals and clients with advanced connectivity, reliability and accessibility to aid the delivery of information to employees and clients. It also increasingly uses technology to support collaborative working – enabling people to work across groups and departments effectively as well as within project teams and with clients.

The focus is on IT investments that create time-savings and new efficiencies for the firm’s fee-earners. The changing nature of the legal industry is driving the need for effective technology to help fee-earners become more efficient in the face of new and innovative working practices and billing arrangements.

Finally, Wragge & Co insists that any new technology introduced must be easy for the partners and fee-earners to use and understand – and that all technology investments must have an underlying business need and deliver benefits accordingly.

The business drivers

Wragge & Co began looking into portals in early 2004 as a way of consolidating information. A growing demand was identified, but at that time there were few viable technologies and solutions available. The firm wanted a solution that would allow easy integration of various back-office systems without requiring the IT team to carry out a lot of ‘coding’.

The business drivers for Wragge were simple:

A large amount of client data was located in different internal systems and fee-earners needed a quick and easy method of locating the information;
The information needed to be presented in one location and in a business/client context (as opposed to a line of business context);
The central location for the information needed to be accessed from multiple places, making it easy to access from whatever system the fee-earners happened to be working on;
Wragge & Co decided that portals and dashboards were one way of providing partners and fee-earners with a consolidated, contextualised view of client information without excessive integration or coding.

The technology

Wragge looked at various solutions, but were initially unsuccessful at finding something suitable. Either the solutions available required a considerable amount of code to integrate the applications and get consolidated views of information, or the solutions couldn’t offer a contextualised view across the line of business systems.

Ultimately, Wragge selected a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server-based solution from Handshake Software. The solution provided a single place professionals could go to get any necessary information. For the firm’s IT staff, the solution could easily be integrated with a wide variety of data sources, including practice management system, Aderant Expert. Aderant’s recent partnership with Handshake Software takes advantage of the companies’ common focus on Microsoft. Both companies’ solutions use Microsoft technologies, including Microsoft .NET, Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services and Microsoft Office.

Implementation and roll-out

As expected, installation went smoothly and took less than a week.

The Wragge & Co IT team then built a series of prototypes and introduced them to various departments and key players to get a better sense of actual needs as well as to secure feedback for continued development. A ‘trickling awareness campaign’ was carried out during the internal development cycle to inform people of the new project and its expected benefits.

The first prototype of the portal was presented to a small number of people, including the managing partner and representatives of the finance and marketing departments. Based on the positive responses received, the team then developed a second prototype. This was presented to six partners for feedback as to the type and amount of data they felt should be shown in the dashboard. The IT team also had feedback from partners on the appropriate training requirements for the fee-earners. The answer, however, was none. Partners felt the system was so easy to use and understand that no training (other than some online help documentation) was really needed before the fee-earners could take advantage of it.

The first group of fee-earners to have access to the new portal were the client-service managers – associates and senior lawyers who represent the day-to-day interface. They had typically requested information be consolidated by the firm’s reporting-services team. The portal was then rolled out to the partners and their personal assistants and then to the rest of the business.

The client dashboard portal officially went live in summer 2006. It included the design and functionality produced by IT and marketing, with an emphasis on client care and relationship management rather than the technology itself.

Integration

The portal pulls information from Aderant Expert, the Interwoven document-management system, the InterAction CRM system and the firm’s own internally-developed application databases. It also uses three tiers of security as well as Windows authentication to protect the more sensitive information. The primary source of security is Aderant Expert’s user rights/security layer, while also tapping into the security of Microsoft SharePoint’s web parts and Handshake Software’s own security layer. This allows for dynamic change in the content that is displayed for the individual user.

Feedback

Feedback was varied, but universally positive. What was interesting was that different people came to rely on the portal for different things. For instance, a number of fee-earners and partners primarily used the portal for financial information, while others used it to track down particular documents or for accessing client-contact information.

The firm can also be much more proactive at managing client relationships, especially in areas such as client-service-level agreements. The dashboard can show client-service managers when pre-defined levels have been hit or trigger conditions that merit a change in billing rates or fee structure, etc. Previously, this information had been hard to track down.

The finance-reporting-services team also noticed a significant drop in requests for ad hoc reports by partners and fee-earners. There is a general understanding that the portal is the first place fee-earners should go to if they have questions or need particular information. Easy visibility of data from the various lines of business systems also encourages users to keep information up-to-date and meaningful.

Ultimately of course all these benefits are enabled by the achievement of the key project goal; the consolidation of contextualised information in a single easy-to-use client dashboard.

The future

Wragge’s next step will be to think about advancing its dashboards and portals in a number of ways. The portal is primarily client-centric at the moment: presenting information about clients in a business context. The team is now looking to expand this to include other types of consolidated information in various contextualised views.

As part of the effort to facilitate and support fee-earners, the team is also looking to extend the way information can be viewed and accessed. This will be accomplished by introducing tools such as smart tags in other applications to provide links to the Dashboards. Other plans include making the dashboard and other systems accessible via Microsoft Office and using RSS feeds to deliver information directly to users.

Andy Stokes is IT manager at Wragge & Co. He can be contacted atandy_stokes@wragge.com