The decision was made as part of an internal initiative to introduce Legal Administrative Assistant (LAA) teams. Mark A. Brauch, Director of Information Services explains, “We saw the market trend of law firms teaming support staff for more efficient lawyer and client service and wanted to accomplish it at our firm.
Certain tasks needed to be delegated more effectively so that the right people were working on the right tasks at the right cost to the business. Lawyers still have their designated LAA but they are now part of team, and we needed a reliable legal workflow technology to underpin the changes and enable the flexibility to reassign and manage the work.”
BigHand Workflow Management will provide the LAAs with a centralized task hub and an effective way to move work around. Previously, tasks could be sent via email, via a phone call, or a physical note - all of which could easily be lost and were difficult to monitor.
Lawyers will be able to assign tasks to the right support resource and track the progress for more informed client updates, including accessing the tech on mobile while out of the office or working from home. For management, access to key operational data around work types, volume, capacity and resource utilization, will enable informed business decisions to future-proof the firm and its structure.
On COVID-19, Mark comments, “One positive side effect of the pandemic was that we were able to push the project through so that our LAAs could work more effectively from home and we had a way to balance work evenly. The result is that we feel comfortable establishing a hybrid of part office/part home working in the future because the BigHand tool will easily facilitate the moving, managing and tracking of tasks for optimum client service.”
“My reaction when I saw the technology, was that it was clear it had been built for law firms and was exactly what we needed. I’d worked with the HR team to establish our project goals and was happy to see that BigHand Workflow Management could help us achieve these.”
“We were already BigHand clients with some of our staff using BigHand Digital Dictation, which helped our decision to convert to the full workflow solution and aided adoption through the pilot stage. The BigHand team has been very attentive and patient with us throughout.”
Mark concludes, “The visibility of the workflow and being able to easily move and track the work will lead to enhanced turnaround times and better prioritization of tasks. Ultimately, BigHand Workflow Management will help us to maintain one of our guiding principles of providing excellent service to our clients.”
