BLOGS
External Support Services: A Strategic Ally to Law Firms – Part 2
This post is the second in a three-part series.
“Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all.”
- Peter Drucker, management consultant, author
The WFH situation has altered legal firms’ perceptions about what’s necessary and what’s dispensable. I spoke to an AM Law COO in June and he mentioned the firm was surprised with the number of processes that became obsolete during the pandemic. Are they likely to reinstitute these processes?
The key metric to watch in this situation is, clearly, performance. In our experience, the most common reason for firms to NOT take advantage of more efficient support models is uncertainty. Operational inefficiencies and a lack of workflow transparency can be a profit-killer. With work practices changing ever so often, new processes = new problems. In such scenarios, an automated workflow that maximizes efficiencies, eliminates security vulnerabilities, and improves collaboration can potentially future-proof your business.
Acknowledging this opportunity, RRD built METRICS, an automated workflow solution that seamlessly integrates the best of today’s technology with everyday work demands. Doing away with time-intensive manual processes, METRICS delivers unprecedented transparency into the workflow through customized reporting, utilization tracking, and administrative dashboards.
In a world where time is money, METRICS provides a simpler way to cut through the chaos and fluidly combine the business accelerators of speed and efficiency.
Security and Compliance
In almost all of my discussions with AM Law leaders in the past decade about working outside of the firm’s office, there has been some mention of the firm’s security concerns. A few months ago, when most of the world sent their employees home to work, the lack of enterprise-grade safeguards started up a buzz around security hygiene. Considering the range of new touch points, equipment, and systems that will be introduced to the network, there will be new risks around:
- Cybersecurity: Rise in COVID-19 related attacks.
- Compliance: Clients unwilling to sign infosec waivers.
- Storage: Any third-party cloud storage services used have to be thoroughly verified.
- Printing confidential information: Confidential information could become inadvertently compromised when it is being printed or disposed of with regular waste.
- Hardware procurement and security: Procurement protocols for hardware and software purchases will have to be reviewed since personal computers cannot be a long-term option for WFH.
The easiest and most efficient way to leap over all these security and compliance hedges would be to partner with an expert with the technology chops to put in place a 360◦ degree WFH strategy. An industry leader like RRD can help legal firms shrink their physical footprint, establish security protocols, employ a global network of resources, all while leveraging the benefits of WFH.
Global Resources at your Fingertips
RRD can enable a flexible approach to managing firms’ complex customer communication processes by uniquely combining best-of-breed outsourcing operations with workflow technology.
Using Optishore by RRD, an advanced workflow and collaboration platform, RRD’s onshore, nearshore, and offshore teams share critical content on a global scale in real time. It can help reengineer and transform firms’ processes in a controlled onshore environment, before migrating the stages that can be replicated, packaged, and managed offshore. By breaking down a process this way, firms get the best of both worlds - transformation in a de-risked environment and significant cost benefits as the process scales.
The Optishore by RRD platform gives legal firms access to qualified and experienced teams, but with greater flexibility and at lower costs. Our UK and Ireland operations provide the perfect environment to reengineer and transform critical communication and business processes. Our operations in Central and Eastern Europe, on the other hand, provide a nearshore base to access skilled resources across a number of disciplines, while complying with data protection requirements.
Our teams in India and the Philippines give our clients access to a lower operational cost base, as well as unrivaled specialist expertise, across back-office processing, financial, legal support, and research disciplines.
Delivery Innovation
Law firms are not known for being forerunners in technology adoption. A typical legal firm is one in which digitization exists alongside legacy applications and disparate systems created by internal developers. Remote working in such firms will not be viable unless the firm’s key processes are underpinned by an innovative service delivery system that can bring it all together.
Attorneys must be able to quickly and intuitively access support teams for service. In the new normal, traditional means of access to functional support teams need to give way to change management and process reengineering. This is critical to building digital processes that will enhance efficiency and user experience. RRD has the ready-to-implement expertise, tools, and resources to deliver whatever firms need for their new business framework. We have a range of proprietary technologies that can be tailored to clients’ specific needs.
RRD does all the due diligence and process mapping required to incorporate unique aspects of each firm’s process during solution development.
- RRD’s portfolio of AI-powered productivity and marketing solutions can help firms:
- transcribe hours of multi-party conversations in minutes with RRD TRANSCRIBE
- extract meaningful information from both structured and unstructured documents with RRD SMARTDOC, and
- take the drudge out of document creation, formatting, and proofreading with RRD WORDSOL.
In addition to expediting processes, RRD can elevate firms’ marketing efforts using creative solutions such as
- RRD COLLAB, a unified ideation and co-creation supertool to enable seamless collaborations and
- AGENCY X, a suite of creative communications services delivered by a scalable global talent pool.
Furthermore, RRD offers a complimentary strategic assessment on the viability of a partnership with the firm, so the leaders can present a strong business case to their Executive Committees. But what differentiated value is RRD bringing to the table?