Pannone & Partners: making the most of technology?

Many law firms have invested considerable sums in their IT systems, but how many are truely satisfied with the results? Caroline Poynton talks to Joy Kingsley, managing partner, and David Griffiths, IT director at Pannone & Partners, about their technology and how it has supported the ongoing strategy of the firm.

Six years ago, Pannone & Partners sat on the brink of a brave new world. Little could they realise that within a few years, they would develop from a firm in which fee earners didn’t even have computers to one in which they were using case and matter management, an effective firm-wide intranet, and voice recognition.

From the mid-nineties, Pannone & Partners has grown from 200 to 420 people and fee income has gone up from £7m-£23m this year alone. In the last three to four years, the number of equity partners has increased and they’ve doubled their profits. At the same time, its IT department has grown from one partner, who knew a lot about IT, to a nine-member team of IT professionals, well experienced in working with law firms.

In contrast, the legal news is full of tales of woe. De-equitisations are a regular feature of the legal press and we are still reeling in the wake of the dissolution of Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison. Joy Kingsley, managing partner at Pannone & Partners, is well aware of potential problems. To begin with, business stability takes on a new meaning when faced with a possible war with Iraq and its consequent impact on an already uncertain economy. Equally, maintaining a business demands a lot more than just keeping things going. As Kingsley says: “We have to manage things like pay rises (approximately £1m a year), which means that we have to generate £1m more legal work just to stand still.” Against the fears for the market in general, there are also unknown elements within the existing workforce, a factor that Kingsley admits has been one of their main challenges. Only last year, one of the firm’s introducers couldn’t bring in as much work as had been expected. Although such eventualities can to a certain extent be foreseen, the reality is that one day the introducer was bringing in 2,500 cases and the next, 500. It’s a huge difference that even the best planning cannot entirely control.

So how has Pannone & Partners approached the opportunities and challenges posed by recent years? First and foremost, it is a full-service firm, covering all types of law. This has provided a shield in turbulent times and as Kingsley says, “If you’re in a firm that does mainly corporate work, a less buoyant economy will have a more dramatic effect.” The firm has also made some major strategic decisions. In particular, the re-mortgaging and personal injury departments have joined the bulk market where a greater number of potential clients can be targeted from a wider geographical base. The bulk market isn’t without some potential problems of it’s own. There may be a fear that client relationships will suffer and that the quality service that a firm has long nurtured will be lost to the principle of quantity rather than quality.

For Pannone & Partners, this is where IT has played a fundamental role. Kingsley uses an apt example of the importance of IT in the bulk realm: “If you’re trying to work on a paper system, which includes 1,000 new files every month, and clients are phoning at least once every couple of minutes, it’s going to be a disaster.” With re-mortgaging, Pannone & Partners realised that if they wanted to grow and maintain service quality, they would have to develop an IT system over the internet. They became one of the first firms to develop an internet reporting system. At first, Kingsley admits, the system was very basic, but gradually they implemented a system that could carry the transactions from start to finish.

Similarly, with personal injury (PI), Pannone & Partners became one of the first firms to have case management for PI work. Kingsley says the system, which was written by an Irish lawyer, “was great on a legal basis but unfortunately, they never thought about supporting the system so when it crashed, as it started to do frequently, no-one could do anything about it.” Such early efforts were shortly followed by the Axxia case-management system, which was implemented five years ago. Since then, Pannone & Partners has spent a lot of time and effort developing the system, particularly as it doesn’t just deal with road traffic accidents, but also industrial accidents and accidents abroad. All require different systems and consequently, the system and department has become quite extensive – there are now 100 people in the PI department, a significant proportion of the overall firm.

The evolution of the firm’s bulk departments has been paralleled by the growth of the management and IT team. As recently as two years ago, a partner with IT knowledge managed the small IT department. Kingsley is quick to give him credit, saying that he bought wisely and made some important decisions including moving the firm to a Word-based system. Kingsley is also aware, however, that, “when you have a fee earner who is also trying to manage the IT, the real development of where we should be and what we might do just isn’t there.” Knowing that they wanted to grow the business meant putting into place some key individuals, who could drive the strategy as well as the technology. This included a financial, marketing and IT director.

David Griffiths joined the firm as IT director and faced a monumental task: managing the firm’s migration from Novel to Microsoft. He completed the transition in four months. From there, he put in place an intranet that works on a departmental level. The main page has the general information including announcements, links to different websites and all documentation that is shared firm-wide, e.g., marketing news, telephone lists, the notice board and all the social events. From that, the intranet is split into pages managed by departmental administrators. The intranet continues to expand, as Griffiths strives to make it a knowledge base of information.

Another area in which Griffiths is making his mark is with voice recognition, which he says the firm is taking up very well; fee earners are using it well, there are few issues in training and it has enabled fee earners to work more effectively online, rather than dictating all day.

Apart from the technical side, Griffiths could see that he would have to tackle the way in which departments were using IT as there was littleguidance across the firm. He knew that other IT directors had experienced problems getting law firm staff trained and up to speed. He has not, however, encountered such issues. Even when he had 400 people to train following the firm’s migration to Microsoft, he says that few if any people missed the training sessions.

Griffiths believes this firm-wide support for IT initiatives is largely down to the enthusiasm and contribution of Joy Kingsley. Kingsley herself admits to getting involved not only with the IT department but also with staff members across the firm with whom she regularly meets to discuss development and appraise ideas. “I spend a lot of time talking to people including the finance department and David,” she says, “I am more hands-on than maybe people would like but I do like to know what’s going on.” By keeping a firm grip on things, Kingsley believes that she will better know peoples’ thoughts on future business development, how much the firm might spend on such ideas, and whether there might be a better way of doing things.

Now that the firm has survived the first few years of significant IT spend, the question must centre on its return on investment. Kingsley says that the firm has succeeded in recouping IT costs. Wherever the firm’s carried out a major IT project, it has evaluated the impact. For example, in the employment department, where the firm implemented voice recognition for £20,000, it has been able to reduce the number of secretaries from seven to two, plus an administrator, saving several salaries. Equally, as the firm has grown, IT systems have meant that the firm has not had to increase the size of the accounts department, for example. This has a further cost impact in that extra space isn’t needed for computers, etc. As Kingsley says: “We can keep the fee earning growing while the administrative and secretarial side remains static.”

This logical argument makes perfect sense, particularly in the current market. There are some concerns, however. With a firm that is already focusing a lot of its business on the bulk market, could such streamlining eventually mean that so much is automated that the client relationship and service quality is lost to a higher ideal of getting the cash in and saving on overheads?

Pannone & Partners appears to address this with the right attitude. As we have seen, the core support departments have grown in recent years with the recruitment of the marketing and finance directors and of course, the growth of the IT team. The automation that has been applied should improve customer service. In PI, for example, Kingsley says that it was well known for tapes to be piled up on the floor, a month at a time, just waiting to be typed. This has now been reduced to three days. Also, where there were two secretaries to every fee earner, there is now less than one.

The fee earner can take greater control of his or her own affairs and better manage the cases and clients in his or her remit. This can only be good both for clients and the firm as a whole.

The future for Pannone & Partners looks likely to be as hectic as its recent past. Among several ideas, there are plans to implement a new telecoms system, develop the online capabilities, expand the reporting side of the intranet, introduce autobilling and improve the different databases for each department. There are some challenges: the firm still awaits news on government plans for clinical negligence, for example. Kingsley describes her role as keeping on top of all the existing and potential problems that will have to be addressed. Her hands-on attitude, however, should more than help the firm face the uncertainties of the future and if forewarned is forearmed, then Kingsley and her team are set for a bright future.

Joy Kingsley is managing partner and David Griffiths is IT director at Pannone & Partners. They can be contacted at: joy.kingsley@pannone.co.uk and david.griffiths@pannone.co.uk.