The technology-forward firm has multiple practice areas operating across its four offices with every team currently managing legal support work in different ways. Despite enforced remote working removing the geographical office barrier for its teams, the firm needed a uniform way for legal work to be delegated and processed throughout the firm.
Luke Hurst, Head of Business Systems at Ashtons explains, “When COVID-19 hit, it was largely business as usual for the firm, thanks to the robust flexible working policy and systems we already had in place. What became apparent, however, was that remote working highlighted an existing problem of a lack of visibility over the support workflows throughout the firm.”
He continues, “A small part of the support function is centralised, and we plan to extend this further to best serve our lawyers and clients. But in order to plan for the future we need better visibility into what types of work are being sent to which resources, where the bottlenecks are, and to be able to move work around depending on capacity.”
BigHand Workflow Management will provide Ashtons’ support staff with one centralised view of all tasks, and an effective way to move work around. Lawyers will be able to assign tasks to the right support resource and track the progress for more informed client updates. The firm will also be one of the first to take advantage of BigHand’s latest version, with added granularity of reporting into key operational data around work types, volume, capacity and time utilisation.
“We were impressed with the level of data insight provided by BigHand Workflow Management. The fact that our management can have visibility into the vital operational data needed to make informed business decisions around future centralisation was a winner for us. That and the BigHand Team too, who have a wealth of knowledge in legal workflows, and have provided excellent service throughout the process.”
Luke shares another reason for adopting the technology, “We want to use BigHand Workflow Management to empower our senior support staff to assign tasks to the correct level of resource internally. This should make their jobs easier by being able to concentrate on work suited to their role, and remove added pressure to complete all the tasks sent to them from certain lawyers.”
“In a similar vein, BigHand Workflow Management will also provide the insight we need to ensure lawyers are still optimising billable hours by delegating administrative work, and not completing this themselves while working from home.”
Ben Hallatt, newly appointed Chief Operating Officer at Ashtons and champion of BigHand Workflow Management, commented, “As we come out of lock down, we want to ensure we learn from this time and fully optimise our flexible working practices. BigHand Workflow Management will not only help to make our support service function operationally excellent, but the powerful data analytics will help management to make informed resourcing decisions that will future-proof the firm.”
