OP Costs Drafting save more than £60k per year by moving to Access Legal Proclaim

“The actual switch over was pretty simple and straightforward. We were allocated an onboarding consultant and I have to say he was really helpful.

“Support at Access has significantly improved over the course of 2024 and now response times are great and we were able to get them resolved really quickly.”

The full version of Proclaim allows for unrivalled levels of customisation, allowing you to make the system your own, however your business works, something Owen has taken full advantage of by enrolling on our training sessions.

“We're on level 4 at the moment on the courses which have been amazing. The people who have done the training have all been super helpful. We've done bespoke one to one courses and also group courses.”

“There’s a lot of information to take on but the great thing is you have the manuals afterwards and the trainers are always there and accessible after the training.”

“Off the back of that training we've managed to adapt and make Proclaim very specific to us, which has worked fantastically. We've saved so much time in terms of reporting, in terms of processes, in terms of automation.”

“Day-to-day usage by the fee earners, their lives are made a lot easier by what proclaim does for them day in, day out.”

The first objective OP Costs Drafting set when moving to Proclaim was increasing automation and achieving a fully paperless office to enable their growth plans.

Previously, they were manually serving bills, chasing responses and preparing default cost certificates where any mistakes could damage their reputation. They also used the print, sign and scan method for getting signatures, an extremely time-consuming process.

By moving to Proclaim, OP Costs Drafting were able to go paperless, implement a range of automations, and adopt an e-signature facility which is saving them more than £60,000 per year in print and paper costs, and also in time saved searching for and managing paper files.

“I have to say, we are saving a fortune. All our accounts and data is now totally paperless. We don't print anything. It's all kept on the system.”

“We used to spend hours hunting for paper files in our office, even though there's not that many of us here. But we have got rid of every single file in the office and nothing gets printed off.”

“I would also say that another key to that is the stability we get being hosted by Access. We've never had any problems accessing our hosted environment. And so you've got that surety, you don't have to have paper files, you don't need to have hard copy backups because you know you can always access it and that there's never any issue in terms of accessing it.”

“Our case turnover has increased this year and I'm certain that a part of that is because we are saving time on the paperless aspect so we can take more cases on and therefore increase our turnover.”

Before moving to Proclaim, OP Costs Drafting were unable to report on the performance of the business, which made assessing fee earner performance and the overall performance of the business a challenge.

By moving to Proclaim, OP Costs Drafting were provided with access to a bank of fully customisable reports.

“I'm getting getting daily and weekly reports that I've never had before. It means I can do my job better because I can see more. I'm not having to trawl through cases or waste time by undertaking a lot of analytics because Proclaim’s doing a lot of the analysis for me, and so from a personal point of view it means I'm working more efficiently and better from a company point of view.” 

“And the fact that that data can be pulled so easily means that we can then provide better feedback to fee earners in one-to-ones.”

“We can easily analyse fee earner performance with our Fee Earner Analytics, but we can also look at our Client Based Analytics to ensure we’re hitting KPIs for our clients in terms of turning cases around. So it flags up the issues for us and allows us to be proactive in tackling them.”

“This is why I'm quite excited about the introduction of AI and Evo, because I think that's going to be a further development of that and allow us to access that data even easier.”

OP Costs Drafting work with several law firms who are also using Proclaim. This is leading to a manual and time-consuming onboarding process for new cases where they may have to be set up with licenses on their system or dial in to perform their analysis.

However, with the full version of Proclaim, they are able to import clients cases into their own iteration of Proclaim, saving clients money in license fees, and OP Costs Drafting time in trying to access those cases to be costed.

“The great advantage for us is it means greater accessibility to the work because we’ve basically got all the data on our system. We're not having to access the data through their system and from a client point of view, it means that they're saving money from the fact that we're they're not having to pay for another licence for us and it is literally just a press of a button to get the case transferred.”

Finally, Owen shared some recommendations for anybody else considering the switch from Compact+ to the full version of Access Legal Proclaim. 

“The reality is Proclaim costs a bit more than Proclaim Compact+, but you get your money's worth and what you save is efficiency in terms of the ability to become more automated, the ability to become more proactive in terms of your case handling. “

“And I'm certain that the additional cost that you would incur by moving from Compact to the full Proclaim, you'd save it many times over with increased efficiencies, increased productivity, and the flexibility that the Proclaim system has to be adapted, and to be moulded to fit your way of working and your most efficient way of working at that.”