As mergers and acquisitions continue apace, more firms are doing business on a global scale.  The challenge faced by many firm administrators is to integrate disparate systems acquired through merger activity and ensure that operations are standardized across the enterprise.  Global firms need methods in place to make certain processes such as new business intake, accounting and others are compliant with firm policies, while still abiding by local and regional laws.

Consider, for example, a North American law firm that acquires a firm based in the U.K.  The acquiring firm has offices in New York, California and Illinois, while the target firm has offices in London, Switzerland and Hong Kong.  In order to operate efficiently, the firm must establish some standard practices across the board, while still complying with the laws of each state and country in which it does business.

The Initial Challenge
Part of the problem lies in the disparate technologies used in each office.  Continuing with our acquisition example, the North American locations may use one type of time and billing software, while the London office may use a different system from a different vendor.  In this situation, it could be a costly endeavor to dump the U.K. vendor and replace it with the system favored by the North American head office.  It also would be risky, because the U.K. firm has its own practices already in place to ensure compliance with local laws, and re-engineering all those processes would require the retraining of staff, migration of data and an increased chance that some matter, somewhere, would slip through the cracks.

What global firms need are ways to tie together their disparate systems without the need to rip-and-replace existing technologies.  This is where data integration and workflow tools can give global firms a competitive edge.

Building a Global Enterprise
Suppose a firm wants to standardize the process of new matter intake across its offices worldwide.  This can be a challenge if each office has a different conflicts database, time and billing system or document management system.
 
With workflow and data integration software, firms easily can build a front-end interface that connects to each of these disparate systems:  time and billing, conflicts management, DMS and more.  The interface can be built using any number of existing forms technologies.  Typically, a firm would use its corporate intranet to house the forms and act as the task list for attorneys entering new matters into the system.

Under the old system, an attorney would typically enter data into multiple software interfaces, and send e-mail messages requesting review and approval to a conflicts manager or other parties.  With the new interface, the attorney enters the information into a single form, and the data is automatically routed to all the people and systems that need it.  Everyone involved in the process automatically receives a notice telling them that there is a new matter in the system awaiting their attention.  The conflicts manager can quickly review the new matter, approve it, and then route it to the appropriate parties.  In this manner, a slow, manual process that may have taken weeks can be compressed into an automated process that takes as little as a few hours.

An Open Approach
The advantage of this approach is that the new interface is system-agnostic:  It doesn't care that different offices use disparate back-end systems.  The interface can be built with a consistent look and feel across the enterprise, with intelligent forms that walk the user through each step in the process.  This allows multiple offices to implement a standard process, whereby all the "heavy lifting" is done behind the scenes, invisible to the user.  The forms change dynamically according to the information the user enters, ensuring that all the necessary data is gathered and performing all the checks needed to comply with local laws. 

New matter intake is far from the only process that can be automated in this way.  Accounting processes, escalation issues, new-hire intake, expense reporting - all of these processes - can be automated using data integration and workflow software.  There are several advantages to standardizing processes in this manner:

• It automates manual tasks, reducing the risk of human error.
• It can reduce liability insurance premiums, providing an audit trail to prove to insurers that all the necessary checks have been performed.
• It reduces the number of hours attorneys must spend on nonbillable administrative work, freeing them up to focus on revenue-generating activities.
• It gives managers insight and visibility into firm processes, allowing them to track the status of various issues.

For the global law firm, such insight is an invaluable business advantage.  The ability to know which offices are doing what, and where the bottlenecks are, can help administrators communicate better with the head office and provide more accurate financial, HR and status reports.  This, in turn, gives everyone, from local administrators to managing partners, the information they need to make better business decisions.  Data integration and workflow tools also can be used to pass data from a firm's various systems into law firm-specific business intelligence or reporting software, giving managers a global view of the firm's operations.

Meeting Specific Law Firm Needs
Part of the issue that law firms face is in finding the right workflow and data integration software for their needs.  When it comes to choosing the right data integration and workflow system, firms should consider software that offers some of the following benefits:

• Is vertically-focused, designed specifically with law firms in mind
• Provides out-of-the-box connectivity to the systems most commonly found in law firms
• Uses an open approach, allowing connectivity to as wide a range of systems as possible
• Comes with preconfigured processes to jump-start the workflows needed in law firms (such as new business intake, new-hire intake, etc.)
• Provides a visual development environment, with little or no coding required
• Is reliable, scalable, secure and fault-tolerant
• Can be maintained easily by a relatively small IT staff
• Is backed by a vendor that knows and understands the legal market

With law firms rapidly expanding and merging, more and more are beginning to realize the need to conduct business as modern, integrated enterprises.  Fortunately, the technology to operate on a global scale is more accessible and is easily within the reach of even mid-sized firms.  Firms that have expanded into the global marketplace, or even have plans to do so in the next few years, should consider taking a serious look at data integration and workflow software.  It can help put the processes in place that will enable the firm's growth and expansion onto the world stage.

About our author :: :: ::

Rob Stote has over 10 years of development experience in the legal industry.  Rob joined Whitehill Technologies (now Skywire Software) in 2001 as a lead developer for Whitehill One and other products.  He became the Whitehill One product manager at Skywire Software in 2006.  As Product Manager, Rob oversees both the technical and market requirements of Whitehill One.  He can be reached at rstote@skywiresoftware.com.