Multinational law firm

Our goals

A leading multinational law firm faced challenges in how to deliver effective support to practice teams after the COVID-19 pandemic. With hybrid working the ‘new normal’ throughout the firm, it was necessary to rethink the delivery model for support throughout the firm, including roles performed by the Williams Lea Legal Administration Team.

Hybrid working was placing new pressures on support services with fee earners demanding high quality and consistent support experiences regardless of their working location. The Firm had just made a number of important technology investment decisions and needed support from Williams Lea to re-engineer support processes aligned to their new infrastructure.

Working with Williams Lea, the client set out to transform Legal Administrative support, the objectives were to:

· Improve the quality, turnaround and consistency of support services for fee earners regardless of working location or time of day.

· Reengineer business support processes aligned the new technology infrastructure

· Re-structure the legal admin team to ensure an efficient function with clear roles, responsibilities, task remits and hand-offs with other support functions

· Implement robust quality management systems to ensure the consistency of services and drive continuous improvement

Williams Lea’s Ways of Operating overhauls service delivery

Among other changes (such as implementing ENGAGE Workflow & Analytics as part of the client’s new technology infrastructure), Williams Lea implemented its operational excellence methodology and ‘Ways of Working’ which plays a crucial role in supporting the new legal admin service.

This began with designing comprehensive Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) which clearly set out standard ways of working through all legal admin tasks.

Root Cause Analysis (RCA) was implemented to capture any service issues and support continuous process improvement within the service. Based on the insights from RCA, a robust training program along with individual “SkillsBanks” ensured a continuous refresh of skills and training to support the needs of the service

A change control triage was established, allowing clients to identify additional tasks they wanted the Legal Admin team to support on. The triage process ensured all tasks were properly assessed by Williams Lea and the client before being approved and assigned to the team. Additionally, lean process reviews enabled proactive evaluation of existing time-consuming processes to identify and implement time efficiencies.

Operational excellence brings smooth operations, reaping benefits for the client

With core operations running smoothly, the client has been able to confidently explore additional service enhancements. Overall, the client experienced transformed service delivery, characterized by increased consistency, efficiency, streamlined processes through Lean methodologies, and higher end-user satisfaction.