How Lewis Lewis & Co became more profitable with Access Legal Proclaim
Lewis Lewis and Co. offer a range of legal services to both businesses and individuals from their four offices in South-West Wales. They sought a comprehensive case management system to improve their efficiency and billing accuracy. They chose Access Proclaim for its extensive features particularly with regards to Probate and opted for a Premier Success Plan to ensure robust support during their transition.
Dom Green, Accounts Manager at Lewis Lewis & Co said, “we looked at a lot of products, but there wasn't a lot that were as extensive as Proclaim for what we needed it for.”
“Probate was the big one. A lot of competitors can't offer the estate accounts and IHT forms as Proclaim can, and that was a huge pressure point at the time.”
“Other providers we looked at also didn’t have the same levels of support and because this was going to be such a big transition for us, we knew we’d need good support throughout, which is why we also chose the Premier Success Plan”
Resolving issues quicker with a Premier Success Plan
A Premier Customer Success Plan provides a dedicated team within The Access Group to support your goals and address technical issues. The core team includes a Premier Customer Success Manager, a Named Support Analyst, and an Account Manager to present new or relevant solutions.
“Having a Premier Success Plan has significantly helped with support. We’re able to get tickets moved along more quickly by having a single point of contact within Access in our Premier Success Manager, Ross Chapman, who has been really helpful in pushing those tickets along.”
“But it’s also great to also have our regular catchups with Ross where we can discuss the goals of the business and how we can achieve them with Access Legal Proclaim”
Addressing billing issues
Prior to using Access Legal Proclaim, Lewis Lewis & Co, managed their time manually, through paper time sheets, with one person dedicated to entering the data from those time sheets into their case management system. This resulted in the firm underbilling by a significant amount.
However, since moving to Proclaim, users are now able to record time directly within the system, with much of it recorded automatically, saving the business countless hours, freeing up that member of staff and giving more accurate billing numbers.
Dom said, “I fear we’re still not using Proclaim to it’s fullest but just allowing for users to input time directly has made a big difference and billing has certainly improved over the past 18 months.
“It frees up our staff from that manual data entry and so that along with some of the other efficiencies we get with Proclaim has meant that when some secretaries have left, we’re not in a rush to replace them, because we don’t need as many admin staff.”
Journey to Paper-lite
With the rising costs of paper and other stationery, one of the main goals of Lewis Lewis & Co, was to become a paperless law firm. Time recording within the system has certainly helped with this, but they’ve seen great improvements throughout the business.
Our new starters are now working almost exclusively paperless, while many of our other staff have gone paper-lite
“Our new starters are now working almost exclusively paperless, while many of our other staff have gone paper-lite.We still have a few set in their ways who prefer to work on paper but we’re heading in the right direction and we’ve made significant improvements”
This move to a paper-lite office, as well as bringing greater efficiencies and cost savings, also means much easier access to data for auditing and also where staff need to cover others’ annual leave.
“File audits are so much easier on Proclaim compared to a paper file. Everything is much more organised and the data you need is easier to find as all our files are consistently organised.”
“It’s also much easier to pick up a file if someone is out of office and be able to update clients on their case because that information is all there and readily available, so saves us lots of time in having to review files and get back to clients.”
Greater flexibility with FlexPoints
Lewis Lewis & Co. use Access FlexPoints to purchase much of their training and consultancy work. FlexPoints are a flexible and cost-effective way of purchasing services from Access.
“We have a bank of FlexPoints included with our Premier Success Plan, and knowing you’ve got that bit of leeway is really nice. So if you need any additional training for new starters or anything adjusting, it’s not something that necessarily has to be accounted for immediately or get approval for that spend.
I can just spend those FlexPoints as I need them.”
Driving Adoption
The next big focus for Dom and Lewis Lewis & Co is to drive adoption of Access Legal Proclaim within the business. Having seen the benefits with those that have started using the system, they appreciate how much they could save by getting all of their team to use Proclaim to it’s fullest.
“The big long-term objective is just 100% adoption. The users that have jumped in are reaping the benefits of those efficiencies.”
“For example, from a probate perspective, where we’re writing to 50 different companies about closing accounts and things like that, now being able to do that in just a few clicks is a huge time saver compared to where we were. And then we can easily keep track of responses to those letters all really makes a difference to the management of our files.”
Lewis Lewis and Co have seen significant benefits from using Access Legal Proclaim coupled with a Premier Customer Success Plan, with greater efficiencies and speedy support, which will only improve as they get more members of staff using the system to its fullest.
