Consistency counts: progressive law firm delivers first-class client service


Napthens Solicitors underpin drive for excellence in documentation creation.

Napthens Solicitors is an award-winning law firm providing legal services to businesses and individuals in North West England. As part of a larger internal efficiency drive, the firm has decided to implement BigHand Document Creation, BigHand Styling Tools and BigHand Metadata Management. The rollout of these solutions will not only ensure the firm have the right technology in place for creating consistent and compliant document templates, but will also support the firm’s goal of pooling some of the legal PAs in-line with a more streamlined support service structure.

The impetus for the project came from the firm’s need to rationalise both the look and feel of its document templates, and the processes for how these were managed internally. Previously, templates were stored in disparate folders without any quality control around the introduction of new templates, the updating of current ones or the eventual retirement of any surplus. The templates themselves also had inconsistencies in house style and were therefore difficult to format.

Kathy Robertson, IT Skills Developer at Napthens comments; “With the new BigHand technology in place our legal support team can create professional documents quickly and easily that are consistent with our house styling. The changes to our internal support structure would not have received the comprehensive buy-in throughout the firm without BigHand Styling Tools helping to make much of the difficult functionality in Word far simpler.” As part of the document creation workflow, BigHand Metadata Management will also allow users to effortlessly view and remove sensitive metadata from their documents, protecting the firm against potential data leaks.

Kathy continues, “BigHand have taken the time to really understand our business needs and have worked with us to ensure a smooth implementation. We have received extremely positive feedback so far, it’s the most excited I have seen people be towards new technology in a long time.” A thorough training programme for the support staff has been devised. After a BigHand Styling Tools training session, one user, who had no prior knowledge of ‘Styles’ in Word, said ‘it’s opened my eyes to how technical the formatting of a Word document can be, and how easy BigHand makes it.”

The support function now use BigHand Document Creation to easily produce professional documents which adhere to their internal template guidelines and are of a consistently high standard.  They also have access to the same tools no matter where they are working from. Those with administrative rights are able to govern all settings and distribute functionality from a central point, to staff either on a global, departmental or even individual basis.

Simon Ainsworth, Partner and Chief Operating Officer says, “At Napthens, we pride ourselves on our forward-thinking approach to technology adoption, not only to ensure we maintain a high-quality service, but also as an enabler for future business growth, and to retain a competitive edge in the market. BigHand’s solutions have helped us achieve a first-class document production function, which in turn, guarantees we deliver a consistent first-class service to our clients.”

About BigHand Document Creation

Give your teams a quick, easy way to design and deploy in-house document templates and let your people work in a more self-sufficient way without the need for support, with the correct template for the job, every time.

Save time, effort and money that can be reinvested in higher value areas. Make template management quick and easy with BigHand Document Creation.

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