Digital White Papers

81 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER LITIGATION AND PRACTICE SUPPORT Organizing and Modernizing Legal Support Services are most competent to do it, you are naturally going to see your quality and employee morale improve. How to Modernize Rather than making sweeping and potentially ill-informed changes out of the gate, the first focus should be on geing a workflow system in place that will give you the baseline information you need to guide your next steps. Make sure the system you choose is configurable to manage your back-office delegations; most are not set up to manage the specific work handled by law firm support teams, while others are difficult to navigate or require massive IT resources to implement. The system needs to be so easy to use that lawyers will embrace, but staff should also be able to get work into the system on behalf of lawyers who may decide not to use it. With the new system in place, determine how much and what type of support work you have, who is doing what and whether the right work is going to the right people. This baseline information will allow you to analyze trends in your current workflow in order to make beer-informed decisions about your staffing, structure and support needs. Once you have good data, introduce change in such a way that your staff can understand the broader picture and easily adapt to it. As with any type of change management, the key to implementation is to engage key end users in developing the new processes and implementing the new plan. They will be early and vocal supporters and can champion the change to the rest of the staff, encouraging others to buy in as well. Use the newly available data to make sure you are trending in the right direction and identify any problem areas. Keep in mind that vendors who have seen the benefits of similar changes in other firms can provide crucial intelligence to help you choose the right solution to fit your firm's needs. There is no need to go it alone! The Takeaway The trend towards legal work moving in-house and to non-traditional competitors is not going away. The good news is that by modernizing and organizing your legal support services, you can meet those pressures while remaining competitive. Delivering quality legal work will always be essential, but in today's legal market it is becoming increasingly important to focus on the associated work that quickly translates into client satisfaction. By consulting a proven thought leader in this critical area, you can be sure you are implementing cuing-edge solutions to run an efficient and cost-effective firm without sacrificing the quality of service that is critical to client satisfaction. ILTA ERIC WANGLER Eric Wangler is president of the North American business unit for BigHand. Eric previously served as vice president of Ricoh's legal vertical segment and has over 20 years of experience in the legal industry. He can be reached at eric. wangler@bighand.com.

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