Legal process management at commercial law firm Tods Murray
Scenario:
Leading UK law firm Tods Murray wished to introduce a new process management suite to place its lawyers at the forefront of legal technology. Tods Murray required the chosen solution to enable graphical design of workflows, template documents, forms, reports and data structure.
Background:
Tods Murray was investing in a range of interoperable IT systems which would encompass process management, practice management, contact relationship management and document management. The FloSuite business process management solution was identified as the ideal system to fit into this major upgrading project, for a number of reasons.
Ian Beck, IT Manager, Tods Murray Solicitors, said: “We carried out an in-depth analysis of the leading legal and business process management solutions and concluded that FloSuite offered unrivalled flexibility for professionals and would enable the deployment to new practice areas in a shorter development window than it takes to deploy scripting-dependent systems. These were compelling benefits for Tods Murray and ultimately defined the path we chose to follow.”
Other key factors in FloSuite’s selection were: its ability to model different types of business processes and the relationships that drive and condition service delivery interactions from within one system, and its proven track record of delivering efficiency improvements.
Implementation:
The law is a profession where time, quite literally, is money. Tods Murray wanted to enhance quality control and efficiency, and deliver improved services to clients.
FloSuite was supplied to Tods Murray as a framework to catch their business processes, allowing the firm to design its workflows, template documents, reports, forms and data structure.
Business Benefits:
Tods Murray has gained many business benefits as a result of the FloSuite deployment, including enhanced quality control and improved efficiency – which have delivered improved services to clients.
In summary, the FloSuite solution has:
- Enabled the easy integration of a leading flexible process management solution with a range of complementary IT solutions – such as document and practice management applications
- Increased operational efficiency
- Improved services to clients
- Enabled time and cost savings
- Empowered legal professionals to directly amend and update their own workflows
Technical Overview:
There were a number of technical criteria that Tods Murray specified. These were that the solution should:
- Enable the design of workflows, template documents, reports, forms and data structure
- Have a highly flexible structure, allowing users to directly add to and amend processes without scripting
- Be built using a multi-tier architecture that divided application code between databases, business logic and front-end user interface
- Be able to integrate with legacy systems, leading third party applications and industry standard diary, email and messaging systems
- Be able to support standard browser access over remote links, supporting ‘remote working’ practices
- Be capable of deployment over wide and local area networks
- Have a flexible component-based architecture that supports cost-effective enhancement and evolution over time
Operational requirements were that the system should support:
- Easy integration with other market-leading document management, practice management, and contact relationship management applications, and with Exchange and Windows
- Web-enabled information input and delivery
- Easy-to-use Web-based interface
- Automated scheduling of reports, documents and actions
Summary:
FloSuite was the solution that best met requirements and had the facility to support enhancements and possible roll out across other practice areas in future. FloSuite is a key link in Tods Murray’s new range of IT systems. The product's unique solutions set and unrivalled flexibility has enabled Tods Murray to gain valuable competitive advantage in the race to gain and retain clients.