Case study: Learning to adapt

In May 2007 asb law announced the formation of asb aspire – a separate business focusing on the firm’s volume, process-driven legal work. Combining legal expertise and new technology for real-time updates, employee retraining was just one aspect of adaptation.

By Sally Dunscombe, managing director, asb aspire LLP

Expensive, inflexible, over-complex and insufficiently accountable or transparent” – David Clementi didn’t pull any punches in his groundbreaking review of the provision of legal services in England and Wales, and the subsequent reforms proposed in the Legal Services Bill are nothing if not radical.

So should law firms feel threatened by savvy consumer organisations ready to muscle in on ‘their’ territory, or be energised by the opportunities reform offers?

There is no doubt that the needs, purchasing patterns, behaviour and expectations of consumers generally have changed significantly in recent years across every market. Choice is a pre-requisite for the majority of buying decisions, which is precisely why the formerly stuffy world of the law has become such a highly competitive, dynamic marketplace.

At asb law, however, we feel that talk of a ‘brave new world’ is over-stated and the proposals within the Legal Services Bill actually serve as a reminder to everyone in the legal-services industry that we’re no different to any other service supplier. We have to recognise the changing demands of our clients and evolve to deliver services in the most efficient and cost-effective way possible to maintain market share and develop our businesses.

The recent launch of our new legal-services business, ‘asb aspire’, is the most visible demonstration of asb law’s readiness to adapt to a new environment, and stems from a comprehensive strategic review in the autumn of 2006.

The firm’s management team – representing 10 service groups and four support functions – set out to examine, in a suitably dispassionate and disinterested way, the firm’s strengths and weaknesses, its market and competition, service lines and products, processes and procedures. This rigorous exercise resulted in the development of a three-year business plan, designed to take the firm to the next level and cement its positioning as one the leading players in the South East.

The review had a number of objectives and one of the key issues was to examine how the firm could address the delivery of specific legal services as opposed to advising on particular aspects of the law, whether commercial or private-client matters. Our conclusion was that it was both feasible and desirable to take a more streamlined approach to ‘volume’ client work – specifically residential conveyancing and re-mortgaging, personal injury (PI) and uninsured loss recovery (ULR) – within a separate, dedicated unit that could provide a more efficient service.

While this work is ultimately undertaken on behalf of a private individual, it is usually sourced via ‘volume referrers’ – estate agents and intermediaries, claims-management companies, insurers and brokers. The underlying processes behind these instructions are essentially administrative, but maintaining the quality of output requires supervision by lawyers, legal opinion at certain stages, and is absolutely key to the success of any such venture.

Historically the firm had employed the same systems, procedures and staff structures to cover the spectrum of its services; from a major corporate-finance transaction to a standard debt-recovery matter. Clearly, from a business perspective, this was a wasteful exercise, both in terms of lawyers’ intellectual input and their time.

In the case of ‘standard’ transactions, if you have highly trained individuals, managed by senior lawyers with the correct systems in place that define specific actions, much of the work doesn’t need to be handled by qualified lawyers. In practice, this can result in a quicker turnaround, and certainly a more competitively-priced service. With high standards of service already established and a referrer network wanting to give us more business, we were confident we could maintain those standards and improve the speed of delivery by using different technology and management structures to make the most of our resources.

Enter aspire

Keen to build on our experience, contacts and enthusiasm for change, asb aspire was incorporated as a limited liability partnership running in parallel with the original asb partnership in April 2007. It began trading in June and was created with four complementary objectives:

To provide a first-class legal service to our clients and introducers;
To exploit the benefits of the latest technology to improve efficiency and reduce case-completion times;
To build a structure that provides clear career-development opportunities for staff, while supporting them with training to achieve progression;
To produce profit that can reward hard work and initiative through a tailored bonus structure.

A number of employees transferred from asb law, including the entire personal-injury team, but creating the new business also involved a merger with a local firm, the Andrew Gardner Partnership (AGP), which specialised in PI and ULR services. We also ran a successful recruitment open day at the offices shared with asb law in Maidstone, with over 120 high-quality candidates presenting themselves for consideration.

The combination of AGP’s existing ULR and PI business together with the volume referrers that were working with asb law provided a healthy client base for a new enterprise, but we have already won new clients and contracts. We launched the business in June with 38 staff, and are on target to expand our workforce to 70 by the end of the calendar year.

The two partnerships remain firmly part of the same family. As well as sharing social events, we have a shared intranet and an internal-communications programme that ensures staff in both entities are kept fully aware of what’s happening elsewhere in the business.

As a business created to exploit the opportunities presented by the new legal environment, however, we have to be ready to utilise new ideas and practices and, inevitably, to change some entrenched attitudes. Only embracing the use of technologywill enable us to process a range of work in large volumes faster and more efficiently.

The integration of any businesses is challenging, and requires careful planning and a degree of flexibility from everyone involved. Given our staff are drawn from established practices as well as new recruits, we have experienced a steep learning curve when getting to grips with new systems and processes. We’re all new to asb aspire, but we are learning and evolving in tandem, which is a great advantage.

New practices and technology

With staff from the constituent parts of asb aspire having considerable experience in a legal environment, however, our change-management programme involves individual retraining and development plans, as well as integrating staff into new team structures. Some long-held working practices of fee-earners with dedicated secretarial support have been replaced by digital dictation and a case-management system, which provides the fee-earner with a tool to produce much of their own correspondence directly.

Of course, there’s a natural reluctance on the part of experienced legal secretaries to work in what they regard as a ‘typing pool’. But the reality has shown that far from ‘dumbing down’ the secretaries’ role, the new systems have increased the quality of the work handled at that level, as standard documents are merely a push-button routine. There is now time to work on more complex matters and take on additional responsibilities for direct client contact.

Secretaries are playing a greater part in the set up of new client files, for example – a role traditionally played by the fee-earner – and of course, consistent and accurate file set up is a vital ingredient for the effective use of case-management systems.

Like all organisations seeking greater efficiencies, the choice of software has also been crucial. After an extensive review of the market leading providers, and taking soundings from a number of firms already operating case-management systems, we opted for the Proclaim software offered by Eclipse.

As a package it provides all the tools we need, while offering the flexibility to be tailored to working practices, rather than requiring us to adapt our way of working to fit a rigid system format. In an environment where the majority of work is referred by third-party introducers, a focus on technologically-based efficient service is paramount. The case-import functionality built into Proclaim allows us to upload base client data directly from the information provided by the referrer, with no manual intervention. As volumes increase, this will have a very significant impact on our ability to handle greater numbers, - without the need for additional administrative support to key in client data manually. It also has the added advantage of eliminating any data-input errors.

Increasingly our work referrers also require sophisticated management information. The vast amount of data held in the system – combined with the report-writing function – means we are able to build reports tailored to match individual demands. Ultimately the built-in case-tracking tool will provide a secure environment where clients and referrers can view live case data via our website, keeping them abreast of progress in ‘real time’, without increasing telephone traffic to our teams or necessitating expensive written updates.

The major advantage of adopting new technology specifically for asb aspire, however, is the ease with which changes to documents and work flow can be made. To make the most of this flexibility, and guarantee the system meets exact requirements, the ongoing development of the system is in the hands of an experienced legal administrator rather than an IT specialist. Trained as part of the installation process, she has the expertise to create new work flows and documents and link actions to meet internal and client demand from the outset.

The continual evolution of the system will be a defining factor in our ability to react to market changes and client demands. We have the ability to amend and adjust case management immediately without the need to involve external programmers at additional cost, while system changes are instant, with no need for overnight updates. An integrated accounts package also provides time-saving benefits and limits the chance of human error.

Focus on flexibility

But in spite of the procedural and administrative advantages afforded by technology and commensurate changes to staffing requirements, asb aspire is far from being a ‘factory’ operation. Rather, it’s about taking the quality standards synonymous with asb law and linking them to new management procedures.

Our extensive ongoing training programme covers fee-earners and support staff alike, and the escalation and monitoring tools within Proclaim provide a far greater level of quality control than would usually be available in a manual system.

It’s still early days but, judging from the response of our referrers, asb aspire is already proving its worth to them and the asb partnership. As asb aspire is operating in a flexible, automated environment, it will be able to react very quickly to changes in market conditions and client demand. The key will always be to combine efficient service with quality output at the highest level possible. I come to asb aspire following a long career managing operations in the insurance and banking sectors. I’m not a qualified lawyer. The rest of the senior-management team is drawn principally from the asb law partnership, so we have the best of both worlds in terms of leadership, and an appropriate interface between the two firms.

The legal landscape will doubtless continue to evolve. Embracing change sooner rather than later provides both businesses with the capacity to develop greater flexibility to respond and adapt its approach to the delivery of legal services.

By adapting operations to provide clients with the choice they want, we have been able to apply resources to their best advantage. Those clients that neither want nor need partner involvement because of the nature of their transaction have access to a more cost-effective service. Those who require the added value a qualified lawyer can bring to more complex matters will have immediate access to the expertise they need.

Sally Dunscombe is managing director of asb aspire. She can be contacted at sally.dunscombe@asb-law.com