Electronic delivery of legal services
Linklaters, for Clients@Linklaters: extranet applications intrinsically linked to the systems used by fee earners. In 2002, 80 in-house legal departments with 1,500 individual users used it.
Addleshaw Booth & Co, for the development and remarkable bottom-line performance of Enact, a fast-track conveyancing unit requiring completely new IT systems, new business processes and new management approaches.
Bond Pearce, for its claims handling system. The system – developed internally for less than £50,000 – provides workflows that have increased fee earners’ productivity and automatically generates management information for clients.
Lovells, for its e-commerce venture Anchovy. The website provides streamlined fixed-fee domain name registration, protection and recuperation services via a dual interface used by clients and designated fee earners.
Eversheds, for its client-facing portal, Eversheds Complete, a web content aggregation service combined with internal knowledge management and e-learning systems. A client advisory panel helped design the portal.
Law firm IT department of the year
Weightman Vizards, whose new IT team has, in nine months, relocated its head office, opened a London branch, rolled out case management and switched to server-based computing.
Berwin Leighton Paisner, for delivering a knowledge management-focused intranet; single desktop platform; client extranet portal; mobile access facilities; fee earner news alert service; new Windows/Office environment; telephony integration; online billing; and successful merger project.
Lovells, for the merger, migrating separate IT systems in 15 countries to a single global platform; advancing its knowledge management systems and moving its London headquarters, while reducing IT support call volumes by 35%.
Baker & McKenzie, for team working across 64 offices and delivering inter-office billing; 300 client extranets; a new public website; mobile and remote access facilities; document assembly tools for clients; centralised document centre, wide area network, regional hub moves; and mailbox upgrade to 9,000 users.
Ashurst Morris Crisp, for its development and research and development work with a digital dictation vendor. Its efforts have helped the entire legal market to take dictation technology seriously.
