July 2008, Issue 10
Document Workflow
Document workflow
A Comprehensive Document Workflow Increases Marketability and Drives Client Satisfaction
Closer inspection of the processes used to generate the full spectrum of documents that ‘touch’ a firm’s clients reveal a plethora of opportunities to improve the efficiency, accuracy and quality of a firm’s document production. A firm that has undergone this inspection benefits from an overall increase in client satisfaction, as well as provides the new business development team with market advantages. A law firm should adopt the same care and attention placed in the building and maintenance of its precedent collection to improve not only the final work product delivered to its clients, but also the documents that introduce the prospect to the firm and the new business intake documents that ensure a good start to an engagement. This comprehensive approach increases client satisfaction and productivity within the firm. Web services. D3 then creates an engagement letter (multiple offices, languages and entities) on the server, and that engagement letter is then automatically profiled in the firm's document management system. Simultaneously, D3 instigates an e-mail to the partner and secretary confirming that the engagement letter is ready for signing. Finally, D3 passes the document number assigned by the DMS to the NBI database.
Expertise and Experience
Storing, managing and reusing its expertise and experience provides a law firm with the ability to clearly and persuasively position itself as a highly-qualified supplier of legal services. A global 150 law firm previously used massive Excel spreadsheets to track firm experience and expertise. This process suffered from several inefficiencies: (1.) the information was difficult to maintain and to share across the firm's offices; (2.) when copied from Excel and pasted into a Word-based pitch book, the information was improperly-formatted and did not include associated graphics (like the client's logo). Using D3, the law firm's business development group consolidated its expertise and experience into one location namely Microsoft Word - that is available to all fee-earners and business development professionals. Using an intuitive interface, a fee-earner in any of the firm's offices can easily select search criteria across multiple categorizations and quickly identify and choose relevant expertise and experience. Once selected, the information - a brief description of the engagement and the client's logo - can be input into a pitch book or RFI response with a single click, while adopting the document’s formatting. Adding and editing expertise and experience information is very simple. The task is delegated to a business development professional, who uses an interface from within Word to enter new engagement information, including search criteria. Once entered into D3, the new experience or expertise is made available to all fee-earners and designated support staff.
Marketing Pitch Books
Eliminate duplicative steps and produce consistently-powerful pitches by accessing centrally-stored firmapproved content and pushing proposal data to a tracking database. A global 100 law firm uses Microsystems D3 (Dynamic Document Drafting software) with Word 2007 to generate marketing pitch books more efficiently, which saves time and reduces cost. This firm has four practice areas and each area utilizes a different proposal. Before implementing D3, the business development managers reviewed nine different documents and selected verbiage from each of the documents to cut and paste into their technical proposals. The business development managers now generate proposals by selecting the appropriate practice content from the D3 clause database. Subsequently, D3 pushes the deal details into a tracking database for future analysis.
New Business Intake
An efficient new business intake (NBI) process results in improved risk management and less time required by lawyers when kicking-off a new client relationship.
Providing document drafting automation workflows increases efficiency, assures quality and minimises risks. This A global 20 law firm uses a product based on Windows comprehensive approach to documents throughout the client’s Workflow Foundation for new business intake. At the lifecycle ensures consistent client interaction and maximizes the conclusion of the NBI process, information is sent to D3 via use of the firm’s resources. Learn more at microsystems.com Issue 9 Legal Technology Journal