Leading Australian law firm Hall Payne Lawyers has transformed collaboration and achieved firm-wide visibility of support tasks to facilitate flexible, hybrid working that is fundamental to recruitment and retention in a competitive employment market, with the adoption of BigHand Workflow Management.

The implementation has transformed Hall Payne’s allocation of work, empowered support staff to take ownership of tasks and provided lawyers with immediate access to a pool of talent across the firm.

The firm was inspired to upgrade its BigHand licenses to the full Workflow Management offering to achieve support task visibility and gain key operational data to inform decision making. While the legal support implementation was a strategic initiative, Hall Payne Lawyers saw the opportunity to achieve an initial ‘quick win’ by improving its inbound referrals process. 

As Emma Wade, People and Culture Leader at Hall Payne Lawyers says, “Hall Payne Lawyers has a number of individuals dedicated to managing client referrals and we need to be able to track the progress, ensure the client has been allocated to the correct individual and that the initial enquiry has been followed up. Using the legal-specific workflow tool ensures multiple people have full visibility of each referral, with prompts to ensure timely follow ups to referrals. The process is now far more well managed and organised.”

Looking ahead, the firm is looking to further refine the process by allowing direct delegation between staff – lawyer to lawyer, assistant to assistant – and allowing assistants to log their own task, providing the firm with a complete view of the chain of activity at the click of a button. “Further simplifying this workflow will make another significant improvement in the process of responding to and managing referrals, including significant administrative time savings,” she confirms.

Having proved both the value and ease of implementation of BigHand Workflow Management, Hall Payne Lawyers focused on the tool’s potential to support flexible working across the firm. As Emma explains, “In our support team we have several employees who are working part time or returning from parental leave and therefore need a little more flexibility.”

As Hall Payne Lawyers rolls out BigHand Workflow Management across the firm, Emma is looking forward to exploring the powerful operational legal data and reporting, to better understand support workloads across each office, including trends and demand for specific tasks. In addition to providing accurate data to support staff recruitment needs, the reports will also reveal the activities of different staff members and surface any issues that may require action.

“We need visibility to support our employees. I don’t want one employee to be working nine hours a day, and another four hours. It is hard to see that in the office, even harder when people are working remotely,” Emma explains. “With BigHand Workflow Management we have the insight to understand how people are working; to highlight any problems with specific tasks and engage quickly to address any issues. We now have the ability to ensure everyone is supported and fulfilled, while optimising our client delivery.”

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