Bundledocs case study: Fisher Jones Greenwood
Recent years have seen firms in the legal sector looking to modernise their practices – everything from digitisation and cloud to agile working and paper-light initiatives. SME law firms historically have struggled to keep up with the pace of change at their bigger competitors, but solutions are becoming more readily accessible – and manual processes are coming to an end.
This is certainly true for Essex- and London-based firm Fisher Jones Greenwood (FJG). Peter Carr, head of IT and partner at the firm, says before Bundledocs the post room would be tasked with photocopying all of the bundles, some of which had upwards of 500 pages.
“This would keep them occupied for a whole afternoon, easily. With Bundledocs, we can do that same job within minutes – it will all be properly indexed and the order can be shuffled around easily. There’s a huge saving on labour, as well as on copying costs.
“We’ve been able to take on more work, but also turn that work around more quickly. And each document that goes out looks much more professional and consistent with the firm’s house style. I’ve seen some pretty horrid bundles come out of some firms, and you can’t help but think what a bad image that plants in your partners’ minds and also those of your clients’.”
Wrapped up
The old way of working was not sustainable, on a number of levels. Not only would staff be tasked with the manual, boring and time-consuming job of photocopying bundles, but if a new insert came along in the middle of that work then they might have had to start it all over again – and then manually index it, says Carr.
“With Bundledocs, it’s all taken care of. You can create templates and cover pages to suit the firm’s house style – and get some really good-looking bundles very quickly.
“And we’ve started using it for things I wouldn’t have thought of previously. Not just bundles: staff are putting together reports for teams, and we’re even using it for our partners’ strategic retreat.”
Bundledocs fits nicely into the firm’s paper-light journey. Carr says FJG identified that it was paper-heavy in some departments – of course, family law bundles are still printed for the courts, but areas such as litigation only really need information compiled in a pdf.
The technology also enables the firm to collaborate with clients and other parties further. “Others can contribute to our bundles. Clients can upload their own documents to it – and because it’s hosted, you share that version of the document without having to send emails back and forth. Everyone can always see the current version of the bundle.
“What’s more, because it has a redaction tool built in, you can set up sight limits for certain parties. For example, being able to share a bundle without sensitive or confidential data visible to the law firm – they can’t modify it and will only see the bits that they’re privileged to.”
He adds that the redaction tool is especially helpful if you’re compiling information for a data subject access request.
More on its data capability: Bundledocs also has optical character recognition (OCR) built in, which means that you can search images and text in pdfs. “All of this functionality means that you can centralise the management of bundles – so it’s all easily auditable,” says Carr.
Better together
FJG was one of the first UK users of Bundledocs. Carr says the platform is quite intuitive. “Bundledocs did remote training with our family law team, and we started creating bundles that same day.
“It’s one of those products that does its task very, very well. And as it has matured, Bundledocs created integration options for our practice management system, Tikit Partner for Windows. It’s great to join up all the dots, which makes a good product great and makes our PMS database that much more useful.”
The whole product undergoes a development cycle every three weeks and, Carr adds, the team is very good at listening to feedback. “Bundledocs is always very open to any problems that we’re encountering because IT wants to make the product better.
“In one case we had an issue where oversized pdfs weren’t sizing up correctly and were getting cropped. Within a couple of days, the developers found the problem, fixed it and relaunched the product – and because it’s web hosted, it was fixed without any effort on our part.”
Carr says that, last but certainly not least, the firm takes security very seriously and Bundledocs has good security around it – for example, you can have two-factor authentication if you want it.
“It’s software as a service – there’s no infrastructure, and the integration with our PMS and any patches or updates are taken care of for us. For an SME law firm like us, it’s perfect.”
This article was taken from LPM April 2020.
