Going For Gold: Anthony Gold Solicitors take strides towards optimal efficiency with BigHand Workflow Management

Anthony Gold Solicitors is amongst London’s most progressive small-medium sized law firms and has long had a firm eye on how technology can be used to improve their business processes.

As part of the firm’s most recent restructuring exercise, Anthony Gold has invested in BigHand’s task delegation tool, BigHand Workflow Management, to remove paper-based processes, increase the visibility of tasks across teams and improve the prioritisation and allocation of work. All of which have combined to save money and time, whilst improving staff satisfaction.

Restructuring for optimal performance

Until 2015 Anthony Gold was operating with a traditional Fee Earner to Secretary ratio, with Authors sending their Dictations, bookings, matter setup, printing and postal work to the secretaries and any general administration work to the back office. With continuous growth in mind, the firm undertook an exercise to streamline this process to become more efficient and gain maximum benefit from the wide range of skills within its administrative team. In addition, Anthony Gold set out to remove its historic, paper-based process of allocating tasks to individuals and teams.

John O’Connor, Head of IT at Anthony Gold, comments:

Law firms, especially small ones, that haven’t driven efficiencies, have found life very hard of late. That trend, coupled with the recent Jackson Reforms, helped us realise that we needed to be more nimble and more efficient. We’ve embraced technology to help us.

“We wanted to create a new way of working, with Authors sending Dictations to a newly formed Document Production team. Admin tasks like billing, compliance information gathering and diary management to team assistants and room bookings, taxi bookings, printing, postal work, client /matter inceptions and compliance to a Business Admin team. We chose BigHand Workflow Management as a task delegation tool to help us achieve this.”

Real-time task assignment and task management

BigHand Workflow Management allows firms to create tasks as fully auditable, digital workflow entries, from voice, email, electronic or paperbased requests. Anthony Gold’s Team Assistants create tasks quickly and easily by completing a pre-configured digital form and attaching any accompanying files. Once in the workflow, tasks can be prioritised according to their urgency and importance, and assigned to a specific team or team member for processing and monitoring through to completion.

Moreover, all tasks generated within BigHand Workflow Management are also automatically assigned to the correct team based on task type within the BigHand platform.

O’Connor says: “It’s BigHand Workflow Management that has really allowed this new way of working to operate so well. The big win is that BigHand Workflow Management handles both the direct task assignment and the task management.”

“The BigHand Workflow Management electronic forms are easy to use and then automatically generate and allocate tasks to the right teams,” he says. “Once allocated, everyone can clearly see every task, when it’s being processed and when it’s been completed. We see how long tasks take and we’ve created Service Level Agreements based on that knowledge. That helps both Authors and support staff manage expectations and their workload, and consequently we can spot issues before they actually become issues!”

Efficiencies in practice

BigHand Workflow Management has been welcomed by Fee Earners and Secretaries alike, along with the new way of working, which has enabled the skills within the team to be managed to the best capacity.

O’Connor comments: “One of the key outcomes of the initiative - the introduction of this technology - was the reduction of stress levels; they just disappeared! Where before pressure had come from unexpected workloads, BigHand brought visibility and control of the ‘to-do’ list. It has also helped reduce mistakes further; BigHand is a technology that truly encourages best practice. Being able to create and edit one’s own forms in BigHand Workflow Management is fantastic. With most products you buy, change takes months if it can ever be done, but we can generate BigHand Workflow Management forms  appropriate to us in minutes. Moreover, it’s been incredibly simple to implement and integrate with our existing technology, which has helped with staff satisfaction and adoption across the board.

The secretary to Author ratio has been reduced. We’re using less hours in support work overall and we’re only paying for the skills we need, so the costs have reduced significantly too. We’ve increased profit margins from commoditised work and the service for clients is quicker and of better
quality.

The future’s bright

Looking forward, Anthony Gold is now in the process of giving Fee Earners access to BigHand Workflow Management as well as investing in BigHand Capacity  Manager, a dashboard tool that allows for the real-time, dynamic scheduling and allocation of tasks based upon the capacity available within a team. O’Connor concludes: “It’s great that Fee Earners are increasingly buying into the technology available to increase efficiency and transform
best practice. The combination of BigHand Workflow Management and BigHand Capacity Manager will soon help us to plan optimum staffing levels at all times, reassigning staff across our offices when business need arises. It will provide even more flexibility and control. It’s true capacity management.

We’ll undoubtedly be using BigHand’s technology more and more. BigHand’s product road map really works for our business because it’s about so much more than just Digital Dictation and there are fantastic productivity tools to look forward to. We see BigHand as the glue that binds us and our processes together.