When law and tech meet: how Tees Law changed their business processes using Peppermint Technology
We are currently in an era where technology can reshape industries. Tees Law is a pioneer in adopting technology to revolutionise their business processes. Their transformative journey, with the help of the Peppermint Technology platform led to an enhanced client experience coupled with a reduction in costs.
Innovative tools and streamlined processes have elevated efficiency within the firm and changed how clients interact with and perceive the legal practice.
The start of Project Breeze
Buying and selling a house can be a stressful experience from a client’s perspective, however, the sigh and “we got there in the end” is a phrase you never hear from Tees clients. Legacy processes belong in the past, as the law firm embraces change and adopts technology to better its processes, clients and the in house team benefit alike.
Tees Law’s Project Breeze started from the need to change the client journey from an often stressful experience to a frictionless one with client left feeling in control. Ashton Hunt, Managing Director at Tees Law, says, “We make sure that we think about how the client is feeling around what they are experiencing both in terms of the technical solution and throughout all of their interactions with Tees.
Andee Tyler, director of Operations, adds, “Whilst developing our solution using Peppermint Technology, we could leverage the possibility too add more layers to the process, achieving our goal of getting the right person in the team to handle the matter at the right time.
Project Breeze’s design was mainly about using the right set of skills where needed, primarily focused on moving the matter as seamlessly as possible and ensuring that the right person in the team would always deal with it ensuring the client would receive a much better experience.”
From lawyer-centric to client-centric business model
While most law firms talked about being client-centric, the reality was that most business models were lawyer-centric. Every part of the client’s journey of buying and selling a house had to go through the lawyer, as they held the client relationship.
Naturally, this caused an internal resource bottleneck as everything had to go through that individual first. This meant they had to do various administrative tasks that they didn’t enjoy and would often deprioritise.
Essentially, Project Breeze opened up our ability for better engagement with the client by allowing others, for example, who were great at administering the many transactional tasks to do their part leaving the lawyers more time to add value to the client. This simple premise would mean that both parties would get involved and do a great job while counting on each other’s help.
Ashton Hunt comments, “Since we’ve integrated Peppermint Technology, we’ve had this mantra of the right person, right skills, right time as we break down roles and responsibilities.
Once you get the whole team to interact with each other, challenge each other, and recognise mutual strengths, capabilities, and capacities, you start to get an engaged team working towards a common agenda.
Two years in the making, and the team are buzzing about the fact that this is their process, that they identified who needs to do what.”
Choosing Peppermint Technology
Andee Tyler explains, “We had a Finance system and a case management system, both of which were long in the tooth, and we had exhausted all of their capabilities. The finance system, in particular, was about to go end of life. We looked at the market as everybody does, but Peppermint was the only solution where we could truly achieve our goal of having one instance of the client from which everything else would be centered.
Where the previous solutions were lacking, we achieved these requirements in Peppermint Technology, such as Marketing functionality and truly meaningful BI. We saw the potential to customise the platform to make it do what we wanted. Using Power BI, at the touch of a button it gave us management and business information that had previously involved keeping numerous spreadsheets to get the figures and the predictions we needed.
Another important aspect was that Peppermint Technology is built on the Microsoft ecosystem, so we could leverage everything that comes with the Microsoft platform; therefore, Peppermint was the right solution.
We believe that there wasn’t anything on the market that would achieve what we needed, and it’s probably fair to say there still isn’t anything to fill this space for the type of firm and size we are. “
Ashton Hunt adds, “There is a recognition that we are all getting pulled into the Azure cloud, whether we like it or not, so we might as well back a horse heading in that direction and has the long-standing and strategic relationship with Microsoft. That’s why Peppermint Technology and the Microsoft Dynamics power platform was the right choice and remains the right choice into the future.”
Maximising resources
Optimising utilization of your resource is fundamental to success in any professional service business. If the regular business hours consist of seven and a half hours a day, you should make the best use of that time.
Ashton Hunt comments, “Around six years ago, we used a very inefficient process. Regarding capacity gains, we were recording about 3 1/2 chargeable hours a day on average. After switching to Peppermint’s platform, we could record over 5 chargeable hours a day.”
One of our objectives is for people to achieve this increase without working evenings or weekends. We’re trying to maximise their productivity in the working day. The gains have been substantial, and we still have plenty of room for improvement.
As the roles were defined, with everybody consistently following the same process and knowing which tasks were for them. Lawyers had their tasks, and others in the team took on admin jobs, which they could do faster, better, with more care, and from an economic point of view at a lower cost.
Andee Tyler comments, “There were so many manual processes going on before, which Peppermint has now automated. Inevitably, that has sped things up, and many touch every team. For example, our cashiers had piles of chitties to key in, that kind of repetitive and time-consuming work has been removed, so every team’s processes have improved.”
Consistent growth
Tees Law’s five-year strategy is to double in size in terms of revenue and the value they get from the clients. Only a few years ago, people were reluctant to think about the world of processes and technical development. They now have a different mindset and approach to technology, where people understand it and want it.
Andee Tyler says, “The technology we’ve deployed in Peppermint has enabled us to re-engineer the business structure because of how it processes tasks, its workflows and management information / dashboards. We can create more central teams and have many tasks including file opening held centrally. With limited task management that functionality would have been very difficult to achieve with our previous systems.
The workflow and the business process flows that we can now leverage, has meant that we can build upon that structure, which has inevitably made things much more efficient at many different levels.”
Ashton Hunt describes Project Breeze as “the rock in the pond” because he wanted to prove through a significant project, in this case conveyancing, that the ripples from that rock would work across the other departments.
He adds, “In terms of the development work we’ve done for Breeze, we could lift and shift much of it across other teams, things like the client portal we’ve built. I wanted to prove that this could be business transformational, and the most profound thing was the sense of ownership that this project created in the team.”
What Project Breeze achieved, was to enable Tees Law to recreate different versions of this project, and they are about to launch their most extensive version of this with their private client team and the process of probate.
Looking at the overall achievement of Project Breeze, there is an interdependent relationship between technology and law firms, as this holds immense potential to revolutionise the legal landscape, benefiting both legal professionals and clients.
The efficiency gains are palpable as Tees Law embraced Peppermint Technology’s innovative solutions. The blend of technology and law firms paves the way for smoother workflows, efficient processes, and business growth.
