DLA Piper, a top-five Global 100 firm, has successfully completed a back office administration and support restructure to better serve the needs of attorneys, increase administrative efficiencies and reduce the cost of delivering back office legal support services. BigHand supported the effort with a collaborative rollout of BigHand Workflow Management task delegation and workflow to over 2,000 users across all 28 of DLA’s North American offices.
In the early stages of the restructure, DLA developed a shared resource model to replace the traditional one-to-one relationship between attorneys and legal secretaries. The new multi-level teams were intended to not only be more efficient in supporting multiple attorneys at a time, but more cost-effective by ensuring the right work was always completed by the right people at the right cost to the business. Senior administrators would be able to add more value by focusing on higher-level tasks and more generic, repetitive work could be delegated to more junior, lower-cost resources.
DLA Piper implemented BigHand Workflow Management to facilitate the effective capture, delegation and reporting of legal tasks throughout the business. Following swift user adoption, DLA now reports over 8,000 tasks being sent through the BigHand Workflow Management system each month by over 1,000 daily users, with the proportion of work being carried out by lower-level staff having more than doubled within six months. Moreover, as the roll-out of BigHand Workflow Management expands, both internally and across the wider business, this is expected to increase further.
In summary of the BigHand project, Norma Spearman, Chief Legal Support Officer at DLA Piper comments, “The bi-product has been cost reduction achieved as a result of allocating more tasks to lower level, lower-cost resources and the ability to proactively manage staff to improve their skillsets and enhance job satisfaction. BigHand Workflow Management has unlocked an ongoing project that will continuously deliver ongoing benefits.”
