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Morton Fraser is an Edinburgh based firm, currently comprising 30 partners and approximately 220 staff, and having expanded fairly rapidly to this size over the past few years. As a practice our internal departments handle a range of work including Corporate, IT/IP, Commercial, Rural and Domestic Property, Commercial, PI and Private Client Litigation, Family and Consistorial, general Private Client business, and Employment law. We have a specialist division which handles volume conveyancing work for institutional lenders.
Each of the departments mentioned above utilise Axxia’s Case Manager system in some way (together with Fee Earner Desktop, and the Customer Relationship Management facilities available from an integrated Case, Practice and Marketing/CRM database). Of these departments, Litigation, Commercial Property, Domestic Property, Private Client, and our Commodity Services division make case progress, management and statistical information on ranges of cases, and/or financial information available in real time to clients online to a greater or lesser extent. Our Residential Conveyancers use their electronic file records as the basis for publicly accessible information regarding properties for sale from time to time.
We perceive online case tracking more as an ancillary benefit deriving from the gradual ‘digitisation' of our working practices, rather than an end in itself – the real benefits of well organised electronic processes, both internally and externally, flow more generally from automation of communications and information management systems – however as online access to case tracking is of benefit to our clients currently, we are happy to be in a position to provide them with same.
We invested in Case Management originally in 1995; whilst we are not at liberty to disclose specific costs over the years our investment in licences and hardware will easily be 6 figure, with a substantial additional investment in staff skills, training, and internal system development. We do not of course consider the only benefit of this investment to have been online case tracking facilities.
We also use CA’s ‘Eureka’ Reports’ tool, originally to provide both internal and client case tracking reports although over the past 18 months or so more and more of our information systems including online case tracking have been self-designed (we are in the process of moving all of our existing case tracking extranets onto this bespoke platform as well as using it for all new client Extranets).
Although it took 6-12 months following original Case Management implementation to develop the skill-set amongst our own staff to self-develop their own workflow processes (transaction management, document generation, information capture for reporting, etc), we have since then found the design aspects of the Axxia software relatively easy for non-IT qualified staff to pick up and whilst we appreciate it would be quite difficult for a smaller firm to resource this development we feel it has been very beneficial for a firm of our size to be able internally to engineer specific case processes to clients’ own individual requirements. This has paid dividends when implementing either client-tailored case tracking/reporting mechanisms or automated raw data exchanges/feeds. We anticipate it paying even greater dividends in the future as more legal processes are digitised (electronic conveyancing, court systems, etc).
Our ability to tailor information feeds and case tracking mechanisms for particular clients does therefore come at a cost – development and process engineering is a never-ending process – but it does allow us a great deal of flexibility when it comes to providing clients with a range of options regarding how and in what way information is provided to them. Particularly in relation to some of our Commercial Property clients, it has allowed us to provide information systems online both in relation to current transactions and historic records which have allowed clients substantially to reduce their own record keeping systems and thus reduce their own costs. These Commercial Property Extranets won us a couple of LOTIES in 2002.
Our online tracking sites are hosted on an SSL server and are now largely written in PHP4. The actual content of individual client sites can be varied either from Case Management designer’s desktops within the firm (Axxia’s system includes database markers configurable to set process steps and key information about the file as ‘web-reportable’ or not) or by tailoring the sites themselves. We are currently working on a more automated secure administration and authentication module, as while at present our Extranets are mainly used by Commercial clients we wish to be able to make our electronic file information potentially available to any client at any time. Given that our internal systems are already on an electronic platform, this is not proving to be an expensive process although thorough 3rd party testing of the security mechanisms at the end of the project will add a little to the cost.
Ian Thomson, Ian.Thomson@morton-fraser.com.
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