The independent Scottish Law Firm with offices in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Lerwick and East Lothian first saw the need for BigHand’s legal-specific workflow technology when the global pandemic enforced remote working measures.
Jane Henderson, PA Services Manager at Anderson Strathern explains, “When lockdown happened, we introduced new working practices to transition to the new way of working, including shared inboxes for the PA and Administrator group. It soon became apparent that although we had visibility of work coming in, we still had no easy way to see who had picked up each task, and the progress of the work. When we saw the extra functionality we could gain by simply upgrading our dictation licenses to the full BigHand workflow solution, we knew it was exactly what we needed to optimise our PA Services offering regardless of staff location.”
With BigHand Workflow Management in place, lawyers will be able to automatically route work to the PA group to be picked up by the most appropriate available member of staff, and monitor it throughout the process. Management will then be able to use output reports for visibility of key metrics like work type, volume, capacity and utilisation to make data-driven decisions around staffing, training and performance.
Jane continues, “We have since introduced ‘super-agile’ working for staff which means that PAs are able to complete work outside of office hours as long as it meets the client and department turnaround needs. It’s fantastic to be able to be to offer our staff this flexibility, and we are confident that the BigHand tech will provide the visibility we need to ensure work is distributed evenly and recognition can be given when any of the PA team have to work more hours in busy times. Since we introduced the initiative, our dictations are being cleared everyday by 5:00pm, and I’m excited to monitor the progress of other work being sent once we have BigHand Workflow Management in place.”
Allan Skivington, Head of IT and Information Security at Anderson Strathern adds, “It was an easy decision to upgrade our current solution as our lawyers and support staff were already used to BigHand for dictation, so we knew that training would be minimal. It also helped to know that everything was in place from an information security perspective with BigHand, and we’d always found them to be a helpful and reliable technology partner.”
He concludes, “The pandemic gave us an opportunity to look at our working practices and supporting technology to ensure we could continue to deliver first-class client service while offering our staff a modern, flexible working ethos. We trust that with BigHand’s advanced legal workflow solution in place, we will be able to optimise our support service as we adapt to hybrid working over the next year.”
