Better ways of agile working in the new normal
For some law firms, the Covid-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdown have finally and forcibly broken the paper chains that used to bind secretaries and fee earners to their desks. For these firms, this tiny virus has finally achieved something no end of strategic recommendations, nor the marketing of tech companies like us, ever could. Firms have been forced to enable agile homeworking practically overnight. At Paper River we have seen many firms struggling with new ways of working, and the challenge of even just getting paper documents and post distributed as digital documents to the appropriate legal teams and fee earners. That struggle is also reciprocated on the output side, where print room services and office printing are no longer accessible.
For other firms this has been much less of a bumpy ride, merely accelerating the adoption of specific technologies and agile ways of working that were already in place. We have now seen many of our clients reaping unexpected benefits from their prior investments in fluid workplace technologies.
Paper River has long advocated agile, flexible working and joined-up ‘smart’ business processes. Fear of change no longer matters, and the implementation of new automated digital process adoption has now been mandated by influences beyond the status quo stance of the most resistive legal firm.
Whether it is digital mail room, multi-channel information ingestion, collaborative document-bundle creation, e-ticket requests for office services, or a digital outbound mail review and approval process … it can be done. It has been done by many firms already and they are reaping additional benefits now over and above the original business case.
Once an organisation begins to get a taste for better ways of working and the benefits of enabling technologies, that is often a prompt to review all their assumptions about ways of working and what could be working better. One small practical Covid-19-induced example of this was with one of our international clients, where we transformed their process from physically printing draft bills out of Elite to a digital process that captures the print stream and sends the document as a pdf attachment by email to the relevant secretary or fee earner. This solution has proved enormously beneficial.
Coming out of this crisis we are expecting to face a whole new set of questions and challenges from our customers. The post-lockdown world will definitely not be the same the as the pre-lockdown world. The changes will permanently impact the way lawyers work and the way that law firms are structured. They will want to know how technology can support and ensure compliance within the organisation. This will be especially true of those firms without suitable digitising solutions, who have effectively waived their security and GDPR policies to be able to continue to work at all during the lockdown. Finally, we predict that law firms will increasingly appreciate the role of technology as an enabler and driver of value and profitability.
The storm clouds of this pandemic have not yet passed, but maybe there are some silver linings on the distant horizon. It turns out that the benefits of solutions that enable agile work also provide crucial operational resilience. A physical disaster recovery office would be hopeless in the current situation, but a ‘work from anywhere’ technology capability is saving the day for many firms.
