At Exigent, we’ve been experts in delivering back office support to law firms for years but, in my view, many of our clients struggle to optimise the use of technology. We too for a number of years followed a path of reducing cost by delivering services from our lower cost locations.
We reviewed our services and asked ourselves the question: How have we used technology to improve our service? The answer was pretty confronting; we hadn’t really. Yes, we are ISO accredited and have world-class infrastructure in place but what about actually improving our service delivery – making it faster, better and reducing risk – through team management and output of work?
Exigent doubled in size as a result of the acquisition of mLegal, the India based legal technology specialist in late 2013. We are now a mid-sized business with a global reach (400+ member strong global workforce comprising consultants, business analysts, document specialists, graphic designers, attorneys, software developers and multi-skilled business professionals). We have always prided ourselves on workflow management but what was fit for us pre-acquisition, is not now. The new acquisition gives us greater in-house product development and technology expertise. Bangalore is one of the leading countries globally in producing technology specialists and we knew that to prosper in the next 5 years we would need to have a market leading understanding of how to adapt and deploy technology solutions.
We decided to fundamentally change how we manage our people, and to review best-in-class technology to design the optimal solution for our clients. It is seldom possible to come up with a wish list and have a system designed round it, but having reviewed all the workflow management technology on the market we found that there was nothing to fulfil a requirement that could manage lawyers as well as support staff productivity.
Led by our global COO and qualified Project Management professional, Wayne Ramsey, we identified the key things that would make this a success:
– Number 1. Identifying client’s need. Using our system we can deliver accurate pricing on projects to clients and they can track performance.
– Number 2. Increased productivity of our team by 20%.
– Number 3. Greater visibility for clients and managers. Real time reporting, profit and productivity tracking across all disciplines.
The developers have listened and designed a workflow system with a difference – a system that has been built to be cloud-based, real-time and scalable – “eGo”.
Now, we can see everyone’s productivity, capacity and revenue generation, and this system is entirely integrated with finance. In addition, we can manage and monitor our teams and, importantly, they can see their own information in the form of a live dashboard which means that they can be truly accountable for what they do. Because this system is cloud-based, our clients will be able to use it too. We can help them manage their in-house support teams by providing data showing team output and efficiency. This fits with our strategy to work with partners to deliver better quality http://www.xtralex.com/home.php?sl=0
Now we are finding clients wanting to try eGo in-house to monitor and control support functions, and monitor their in-house teams’ performance. This can extend to all the main support areas: secretarial, document production, marketing and design, to name a few. So we are preparing the launch of a new workflow tool for our clients to help them realise the benefits. Watch this space!
Written by Elizabeth Albery, Associate Director and Head of Shared Services at Exigent Group Limited.
