In October 2020, market-leading support services provider to the UK legal sector, Intelligent Office (IO), now Williams Lea, elected to partner with BigHand, maximising its legal process expertise and technology leadership in legal workflow management to optimise its processes for complex work delegation, monitoring, completion and reporting.

As the only UK-based service provider to offer this level of workflow management and reporting, IO is using the insight from BigHand to help law firm decision making during a time of significant operational transformation.

With over 850 employees across more than 60 client sites and three shared services centres – or Intelligent Services Centres (ISC’s) – in Scotland and Bristol, IO provides outsourced support solutions to the legal and professional services sectors including executive/personal assistants, document production, legal admin, client onboarding and general office support.

In an environment where it provides both high volume and complex support operations, combined with the rapid transition to remote and agile working, IO sought a solution to replace its two separate systems for recording and reporting on its support services to improve efficiency and better inform overall resourcing decisions – decisions that it, moreover, would be able to pass on to its clients for enhanced business insight.

As Rachel McCorry, CEO, Intelligent Office, commented:

“On the one hand, this is about driving efficiencies and managing risk, but due thought and consideration must also be given on how best to optimise a dispersed team, who are servicing agile fee earners. Working in partnership with BigHand and its Workflow Management solution enables IO to make better informed business decisions.”

Ruth Davison, Operations Director, adds:

“Law firms outsource because it is an efficient way of ensuring the right people, with the right skills, at the right cost are executing their legal work. Operational efficiency is, therefore, a critical element of our service provision. We were creating over 10,000 lines of information monthly, and we wanted a better way of managing workflow within the teams at our shared services centres, and those working remotely to optimise the way in which we facilitate our clients’ needs.”

Having reviewed the market for a solution to replace these legacy solutions, IO was impressed with the range of functionality that BigHand Workflow Management offered, particularly the automated task capture, which reduced manual processing time whilst also making a wide range of productivity and utilisation data available. In addition, the rapidly increasing number of law firms using BigHand Workflow Management paves the way for closer integration of the end-to-end process, right back to the originating lawyer at IO’s client.

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