Achieving Innovation with Workflow in Legal

Best Practice
Written By James Lawler

This article was first published to the Tricostar User Group on 13th October 2023 - If you’re a Tricostar user and would like access to the Tricostar User Group for early product insights and discussion, please use the form below to request access.

Written by Jeff Lawler

For the 18 years that we have been installing case management applications, Workflow has always been one of the mandatory features for both our competitors and all new clients which we find in RFI’s or tenders.

Nonetheless with one or two notable exceptions, Workflow does not feature very highly in terms of its usage throughout legal departments within the public sector.

Implementing workflow is hard work and challenging and any failure to overcome each challenge will result in failure. Most of the challenges aren't software-related, so whether you can implement workflow will be discovered well before the need to learn any software.

FIRST STAGE

It requires a high level of motivation from the Head of Legal and the department heads to start the process.

What are the key motivations that department heads or a Head of Legal might consider?

  • Productivity. In legal department terms, this means the ability to achieve more with less. That is fee earners can handle more cases in either less or the same time normally achieved.

  • Efficiency. In fee earner terms, this means the ability to complete casework, more quickly or if the case takes the same amount of elapsed time, the amount of time spent on the casework is reduced.

  • Risk. It reduces the number of mistakes that might be made and therefore improves the quality and consistency of the work delivered.

  • Consistency. It ensures that all fee earners for a particular type of work follow the same process and reduces the idiosyncrasies that individuals might bring into the process without workflow.

  • Measuring Performance. As workflow is broken down into stages and time can be monitored during, and between each stage, it becomes much easier to determine those fee earners who are more effective than others at doing that type of casework. This information can be utilised to re-focus training on those individuals who need it or reallocation of staff to casework that better suits their skills.

If none of the above are viewed by senior management as critical to the department then workflow activity shouldn’t be started.

It's not hard to see why in private practice workflow has become a cornerstone since the 80s for certain types of work. By applying the above benefits in the private legal sector, the firm will be more competitive and significantly improve profitability which drops directly into the bottom line, increasing partners' drawings.

Without that direct financial imperative in the public sector, the motivations will be different though the outcomes are the same.

Senior management must ask themselves similar questions and be fully motivated in wanting to achieve the below. They must also recognise that in a culture where individuals are not challenged, in the same way as in the private sector, are they prepared to introduce the cultural change workflow will create? If there is not a strong will then a significant introduction of workflow will not happen.

This is where the first pre-requisite to implementing workflow in the public sector arises. 

  • Is there a strong motivation need or desire to reduce the number of fee earners in a department and at the same or increase workload with the same number of the fee earners?

  • Is there a strong motivation and management process in place to speed up the delivery of cases in that department?

  • Is management interested in ensuring that the quality of work provided in that department is consistent and that the individual idiosyncrasies and choices about how to do work as sublimated to the overall requirement to have a unified standard?

  • Is there a strong motivation to identify those fee earners in a department who are not functioning or being very effective, either investing in further training or reallocation to different types of work?

Unless one or more of those motivations are part of the management style and process within a legal department then in our experience the implementation of workflow will be ineffective. 

SECOND STAGE

Once the requirements of the first stage have been met the second stage requirements need to be considered.

My heart sinks when I hear staff in our client departments tell me that they don’t have the resources and so workflow has been passed to them as a part-time task as and when they have time. Of course, these departments will never implement workflow themselves, if for no more reason than the first stage hasn’t been discussed and agreed.

The internal skills required to implement workflow are:

  • Someone who has business analyst skills and can process map.

  • Someone who has a clear understanding of how the business process you wish to workflow, works and is analytical enough to see how that process can be improved.

  • Someone who has better than basic IT skills and will be allowed after training, to dedicate probably a minimum of 1 day a week to workflow implementation.

In an ideal world, the above can be fulfilled by one person, but in our experience will require a combination of two or more.

THIRD STAGE

If you can tick the above boxes, then you are well on the way to starting your workflow journey.

For those clients who can’t provide all the internal resources and skills most use Tricostar resources to assist, but that assistance in no way means that the steps above outline can be ignored. Otherwise, it will be a waste of time and money on both sides.

James Lawler