Legal Compliance
Outsourced File Audits for Law Firms
All CQS and Lexcel accredited law firms must complete regular and independent file audits, but it’s also best practice for any law firm to ensure regulatory compliance.
By outsourcing your file audits to Access Legal’s team of experienced risk and compliance professionals, you can ensure consistency in the quality of audits, help to improve your firm’s compliance standards and receive a significant return on investment from the time you save in not completing the audits in-house.
How does outsourcing file audits work?
Our team will work with you to decide on timescales and volumes for your file audits, ensuring that the best approach for your firm is taken with the selection of files.
They will perform a review of your firm’s policies and procedures prior to commencing the audits to ensure that any files reviewed are compliant not only with SRA and any accreditation rules, but also with your own policies and procedures.
During the audit, our team will assign any corrective and verification actions to the appropriate individuals on our Access Legal Compliance system. Access Legal Compliance also allows you to compile your own reporting dashboards showing the results of your audits.
The team will then prepare a bespoke report for your firm detailing themes of findings and recommendations on areas where your firm can make changes to become more compliant. This is then followed by a post-audit call to discuss any specific findings and the approach for the next round of audits.
How does outsourcing file audits save you money?
Many law firms deal with file audits in-house, with fee earners reviewing each other’s files. This can be costly and inefficient as fee earners are likely to be inexperienced at file auditing which means that file audits:
- Take longer to complete
- Are inconsistent in quality across the firm
- May not be accurate as they are essentially auditing a friend’s work, while the Fee Earner also may not be up to date with regulatory requirements and how this can affect the firm in practice.
- Lose you money in lost billing time
By outsourcing your file audits to our team of experienced professionals, you can ensure that audits are completed in a much quicker timescale and with greater consistency. You also get an objective perspective on the firms compliance controls from a team with years of experience in risk and compliance. They have been working with various accreditations such as CQS and Lexcel which they combine with the regulatory requirements to be able to give you and your fee earners pragmatic advice on areas for improvement.
So, by freeing your fee earners from the burden of file auditing, you can bill more, which in the vast majority of cases will be much more than you outlay on the outsourced file audits. You can speak to our team, who will be able to quickly work out just how much money you could save by outsourcing your file audits.
How does outsourcing file audits make you more compliant?
Our team of risk and compliance professionals keep up to date with all of the latest regulations that affect law firms and also assist firms with any compliance queries they may have with our Compliance Helpline. They seek to provide guidance with a best practice approach across the industry. As such, they are well equipped to identify any problem areas in your files that you may not have considered or been aware of.
This often helps to instill a culture of compliance in your law firm, reduce your risk profile and increase the quality of your files going forwards.
