(Guest post by Richard Jones, General Manager, Financial & Professional Services, Xerox)
This spring we saw the UK legal market’s largest ever merger, with experts heralding the union of CMS UK, Nabarro and Olswang as indicative of a growing trend: law firms merging, cutting and making efficiencies because, now more than ever, they’re feeling the squeeze.
But the need to do more with less isn’t always a bad thing, with other industries having found innovative ways to respond to commercial pressures for years.
It’s great seeing how many law firms are rising to the challenge, with one of our own reports identifying some interesting tactics employed by Australian legal practices to improve productivity. For example, 38% of the people surveyed work remotely at least once a week*. And that doesn’t just give staff more freedom – it also allows firms to minimise premises investment costs.
However, the report also shows where some digital benefits are being missed. Four out of five firms still print some or all electronic documents for archiving*. And 43% do so because “It’s the way we’ve always done it”*.
Obviously, court guidelines and client preferences will drive some of this, but from the conversations I have with legal professionals, there’s also another trend. Many simply don’t believe in digital for digital’s sake and, to be honest, I can see where they’re coming from.
They don’t reject ‘digital transformation’ – more just the ‘transformation’ bit of the phrase. When they look at digital projects they see disruption across multiple areas of their business. That can stretch from the time it can take to train staff, through to the work lost due to confusion over how to use new tools, and onto concerns about protecting sensitive data.
Which all brings me nicely back to the title of this piece. There’s a simple reason for this oversight and that’s because it falls outside the scope of work most industry tech providers are comfortable with, especially your average MPS provider. But it is something we’ve been doing for many years: document analytics.
Document analytics reveals previously hidden ways to make your business run faster, smoother and more cheaply. It uses the data from your documents and printers to point out the specific steps you can take to work more efficiently.
Document analytics reveals previously hidden ways to make your business run faster, smoother and more cheaply. It uses the data from your documents and printers to point out the specific steps you can take to work more efficiently.
One financial services organisation that we work with uses document analytics across a range of departments. We spotted that, in one team, a single process was responsible for 40% of their print volume and that approximately 50% of those pages were disposed of. So we designed a new process with them, digitising documents where it made sense to do so and so reducing the time spent on key tasks by 70%.
Alternatively, you can read more in our document analytics e-book.
* Fuji Xerox Australia Pty Ltd. (2016). Streamlining the Law Firm. [online] Available at: https://ds2psszq7i3si.cloudfront.net/en/Company/Resource%20Centre/Whitepapers/2017/7/Streamlining%20the%20Law%20Firm
