Case study: Capsticks – How Intelligent Office reduced the cost of support per fee earner by 64%

Background

Capsticks, a UK top 100 law firm with a turnover of c.£62m, is a leading provider of legal services to the health, social care and housing sectors, as well as in the field of professional discipline. The firm employs c.670 staff across five offices.

In 2010, Capsticks outsourced its document production, print, mailroom and archive management, facilities management, front of house, and core goods procurement to Intelligent Office and has twice renewed its contract with IO, in recognition of the value our team have delivered.

The Need For Change

Ahead of outsourcing to Intelligent Office, Capsticks had already made plans to grow fee earner headcount substantially and whilst the firm had an excellent reputation for the quality of its lawyers, the support services provided to the firm were not keeping pace with the quality of legal advice it provided.

Having chosen to outsource a range of services to Intelligent Office, a key priority for Capsticks was to free up management time to focus on growing the top line and profitability whilst also working with us to redefine the quality of the support services provision.

Solution

During the ongoing partnership with Capsticks, Intelligent Office has implemented a number of transformative operational initiatives:

• Transforming the firm’s secretarial function with document production being outsourced to Intelligent Office
• Working in partnership with the firm to institute paper-lite working, with incoming mail scanned by Intelligent Office teams at source and no new matters being opened in hard-copy
• Implementing a new ‘Floor Support’ service, providing a one stop shop for document handling and administrative services within each fee earning team, enabling the firm to gradually increase the number of fee earners supported by one PA
• Freeing up PA time to deal with more high value work such as building client relationships and supporting fee earners
• Carrying out a comprehensive review of front of house services (First Impression) resulting in a redefined visitor experience
• Restructuring the office services function to create a new Docucentre, delivering a multi-functional team through cross training; resulting in more output with the same resources
• Assuming responsibility for facilities management, supporting the firm to open four new offices

An Evolving Partnership

Prior to the pandemic, Intelligent Office had transformed the secretarial and administrative functions at Capsticks through digitising workflow, enabling the firm to benefit from an offsite/onsite delivery model and re-engineered support teams. This agile environment implemented before Covid-19 proved beneficial for the firm during the pandemic, however more flexibility was required for the PA support teams.

As a result of new homeworking practices, the Intelligent Office support teams took on more tasks to support the client and many of these tasks involved more risk. To minimise this risk a full review was undertaken of all standard operating procedures, including additional quality checks and implementing new processes in line with hybrid working policies, on which all team members were fully trained.

Once these new working practices were embedded, the team turned their attention to continuous improvement of the service and providing further support, which included taking on records management for the firm. All original documents and hard copies are now tracked, capturing the information of each document, and organising these in a way they can be found efficiently. Documents are completed by the IO support team on behalf of fee earners and approved by the requester before finalising, and a new document retention policy has been implemented to keep the firm as paper-lite as possible.

The most recent project in partnership with our client saw the IO team assist in reducing the firms’ storage by over 50%, with a new office move sparking the need to regularly review and audit files. As part of the move, all documents are now centralised and managed by Intelligent Office, with the service having been refreshed in line with all new hybrid working practices.

Key Achievements

Intelligent Office’s focus on continuous improvement, cross-training and introduction of paper-lite working practices has delivered major improvements to the quality of support services at Capsticks, which include:

• Reducing the cost of Intelligent Office services per fee earner by over 64%
• Through the implementation of paper-lite working, in conjunction with a broader agile programme, Capsticks was able to sublet a substantial portion of its London office space driving a saving to the firm
• Reducing the firms’ storage by over 50% by implementing document retention policies and a new management process
• Improving document production speeds by 32% through better staff training and performance management
• Increasing the volume of reprographic work completed by the central reprographics team by 28%, releasing PA’s time for higher value tasks

Results

Per fee earner, the cost of services we provide has been reduced by 64%. document production speeds have improved by 32% whilst the volume of reprographic work completed has increased by 28%, freeing up PA time for higher value tasks.

Neil Middleton, COO, Capsticks, said: “We saw outsourcing our administration and document production functions to Intelligent Office as the best way to maximise value from these functions whilst enabling us to focus on our clients. It’s a major decision for any business to take. Would we make the same decision again? Yes. IO have made a significant contribution to Capsticks’ over the past ten years. The IO team has worked shoulder to shoulder with us in true partnership and we have achieved much together during a time of transformational growth for the firm.”