Law Officers of the Crown share their experience of Advanced Legal software ‘Carpe Diem’
About Law Officers of the Crown Guernsey
This government department is responsible for the provision of legal services to the Crown, States of Guernsey, States of Alderney, and Chief Pleas of Sark. They serve by offering independent, high quality legal advice, legislative drafting, prosecution, litigation, commercial law services, and representation. Their services exist to protect, and enhance, the interests of the Bailiwick and its people.
We recently spoke with Nick Whalley, Head of Operations and Transformation for this organisation, and Paul Battle, whose role is Operations and Transformation Support Executive.
Their Advanced experience
The purpose, and objectives, of those providing government services are quite different from a commercial law firm. We asked Nick why they adopted Carpe Diem. He responded:
“Carpe Diem helps us to track user performance. Everyone is aware of the pressures on public finances and the general economic situation. Carpe Diem provides us with objective data to support our resourcing decisions. Now, I am able to use the timesheet data when making recruitment requests and I am also having much more straightforward conversations about workforce planning. We would certainly be worse off without the information that Carpe Diem provides.”
“Another thing that stood out from the beginning was the exemplary implementation that Advanced provided. Our project manager sent the plan to us and explained how the project would run. We had regular meetings, and everything took place as scheduled. Our corporate IT is outsourced, and they didn’t have to put time or resources into organising anything as the Carpe Diem team did it all. It was one of the best implementations we’ve ever had.” We also asked Paul about system management. He said:
“The system is very user-friendly. It has a very intuitive interface so staff with various limits of IT capability are able to enter their time. In addition, system administration like dealing with settings, licensing and permissions is quite simple. Carpe Diem has a nice, compact way of managing everything in the background. It has made my life much easier when preparing the system for new users.”
Nick Whalley, Head of Operations and Transformation, Law Officers of the Crown Guernsey said: “The Carpe Diem interface is well designed so it is very efficient to use. We also benefit from its smooth compatibility with iManage, the platform that sits at the core of everything we do.”
Any concerns when adopting Carpe Diem?
For us time recording doesn’t translate to time targets or earned revenue, so initially we were uncertain that Carpe Diem could capture the unique information we required. We needed to see what people are working on, and how busy they are, and we’ve certainly achieved that goal.
How’s support been?
When we’ve had a problem and raised a ticket with the support desk, I’ve always had a very quick and helpful response. The engineers on the other end assist very ably and it’s been a pain free experience to solve technical issues.
What’s next?
Carpe Diem’s reporting functionality is very versatile, but we have to reconfigure results to get the specific format we need. To save even more time, we are thinking about customising some of the reports.
