Curtis Law save IT resource time and take on 50% more work

Curtis Law Solicitors, founded in 2008 with a head office in Blackburn, has fast become one of the most accomplished law firms in the UK, having rapidly expanded to over 150 employees across the group, including approximately 75 fee earners, dedicated to achieving the best for their clients. The services Curtis Law provide include residential and commercial conveyancing, personal injury, clinical negligence, family law and employment law.

We spoke to IT Manager, Mark Forshaw, who manages all the IT software and hardware infrastructure for the business.

What are the strategic goals and ambitions for the business?

“A key focus for the business is diversification. Historically, the majority of our work has been in the claims space but we also provide conveyancing and estate agency services, both residential and commercial, which we’re looking to continue expanding as an all-in-one service where a client can sell a house through us and it’s all taken care of with a single provider. Another key project for us is moving fully to a cloud based system from an on-premise server and domain environment.”

How did you fair during the lockdown?

“We were lucky in that we had quite a good remote desktop infrastructure onsite which could handle pretty much all our needs but we’d never really used it before as it was a backup system. However, if we’d already taken the cloud hosted solution, we wouldn’t have even had to use the remote desktop.”

What were the business drivers that led you to move to a cloud hosted case management system?

“Moving our system to the cloud was accelerated by the pandemic. We were already looking to modernise our IT infrastructure but this has definitely steered it to happen quicker. Given the hosted services provided by Access Legal are purpose built to host the case management system they provide, it made sense to use them.

"In terms of the case management system, we have been using it from the beginning so we’ve spent a lot of time developing it to our specific needs and wouldn’t look to move away from it now. When we first implemented it, we needed a system that could flex and adapt to our needs and that’s what it’s done over the years.”

How have you benefited from implementing the software?

“We’ve been doing a lot of API work and development with Access Legal’s Case Management to support our growing conveyancing and estate agency business and a key part of this is linking our website, where we’re receiving a significant number of enquiries, to our case management system. We’ve been able to automate the movement of information taken on the website into the system, create a case and notify our fee earners. This automation and linkage with the website saves time when gathering initial case information and setting up a case in the system.

"As mentioned, we have implemented the Access Legal Case Management system since the firm was founded and it has been an integral part of our operations. It’s a highly customisable, full featured and automated system which, through additional development to support our specific needs, makes the work undertaken by our staff much quicker and simpler to deliver. Now that the system has been fully developed, there’s pretty much nothing it can’t do for us. The way the system now integrates across the business means we’re able to complete at least 50% more work than if we were operating in a more manual, traditional way. The software allows fee earners to manage more cases, better organise their cases, auto-populate documents, create bundles, link emails and more, all of which would have been a manual time-consuming task previously.

"With the cloud hosted service and Access Legal support taking over more of the infrastructure side of our IT, I believe it will save approximately four hours’ worth of IT resource a week for me which I can then use to focus on strategic development projects.”

Contact us to find out more about Access Legal's innovative practice and case management systems and what cloud hosting can do for your firm.