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McKenna Long & Aldridge
Overview
McKenna Long & Aldridge LLP is an international law firm comprised of 400 lawyers and public policy advisors with offices in Atlanta, Brussels, Denver, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco and Washington, DC.
Challenge
Legal professionals are consumed with mounds of paperwork. Motions, briefs, judgments and contracts routinely fill the briefcases and cover the desks of attorneys throughout the country. For lawyers and clerks at McKenna Long & Aldridge, LLP, paperwork woes were compounded by a flood of administrative forms and business documents.
A case in point is reviewing and processing new clients or new business from existing clients - one of the most cumbersome activities within the legal industry. It requires numerous procedures and onerous amounts of paperwork to make decisions on conflicts of interest, generate billing, and obtain departmental approval to proceed with a new client or to begin new activity with a current one.
The difficulty with the new matter process is not just that it is very paper-intensive, but that it also involves a lot of people. And with offices in seven cities, the firm has a lot of people: secretaries, attorneys, staff in the finance and conflicts department, and records managers.
Solution
McKenna Long & Aldridge still practices law the old fashioned way, but it is using business process management (BPM) technology from Metastorm to automate procedures for new client matter intake.
In a 45-day pilot implementation, the firm required fast deployment, minimal training, and the system had to run on the existing network infrastructure. It also needed adequate security for its confidential financial and legal information. With a goal of enterprise-wide implementation, the system had to connect not just the 220-person legal staff, but a complement of secretaries and support, too.
For each activity, Metastorm BPM creates a new application with an electronic form launched from the corporate Intranet. In seconds, account numbers are generated and assigned to legal files. As each action is completed, data is automatically entered into the firm’s disparate systems.
The system also integrates with the firm’s email system, Microsoft Outlook, giving the IT team better control of users, and saving legal staff from having to master multiple applications. Forms or actions appear as an extension of Outlook, allowing users to generate a notice that a new matters process has started. This is an especially useful feature for staff who only supervise activity, rather than interact regularly with the process. If participation is needed, options within the email allow them to enter the system, amend a form and make the change. Relevant staff are notified when information is added or changed within a record.
Results
Paper no longer resides on attorneys’ desks and instead has become part of the digital environment and communications strategy. More than 350 people use the system, including high-level company directors who can be involved in cases where there may be billing problems or conflicts of interest. Since the implementation, McKenna Long & Aldridge processes new client matters 40-50% faster, offering better client service, and driving repeat business and references.
Before Metastorm BPM it took up to 48 hours to process new matters, which has since been cut to seconds. The online design also cuts down paper use, dramatically reducing supply costs. In addition, the system saves hours of data entry and re-entry with instantaneous, multi-department updates. All in all, over the course of a year, McKenna Long & Aldridge estimates that the time savings enables each attorney to bill at least one extra week of time per year, allowing them to concentrate on the mission, not minutia.
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