Human Resources news

Intelligent Office UK (IO) the leading provider of secretarial and office administrative solutions to the legal and professional services sectors has had an excellent 2019, seeing growth from existing as well as new clients. To ensure an ongoing focus on the development of IO’s offering, we are delighted to announce two senior hires to augment our long-standing leadership team.

It’s no secret that law firm support structures have changed over the past 10 years. As just one example, the ratio of PAs to fee earners is now radically different when compared to pre-recession levels. Where it was once a secretary or PA supporting one or maybe two fee earners, the average ratio in the UK Top 100 law firms today is closer to one PA to five fee earners or even more.

BigHand shares findings from a recent survey of over 800 legal support staff, giving new insight into the daily challenges and working experiences of support teams globally.

When law firms begin to research whether to outsource their secretarial and administrative support services, it can be difficult to know where to start. There’s a lot of information to take in, lots of jargon associated with outsourcing and the processes behind transferring services from in-house to a third party—all of which can act as a hindrance when exploring the possibilities available to your firm.

One of the questions we are asked before a firm elects to outsource is, “once we are working with you, how can we monitor the value you actually deliver to us?”, and at a more tactical level “how will we know you are meeting agreed service levels?” How we demonstrate this is partly dependent on the key performance indicators (KPIs) we set, in close conjunction with each client, during our relationship with them. KPIs are deployed by outsourcing providers, of course, but law firms also use them regularly across their business. But in our experience rarely when evaluating the efficacy of their secretarial and administrative support. This is a missed opportunity, especially if a firm is serious about continually developing and improving its administrative support functions to its internal customers and end clients.

In a world where we are constantly thinking of ways to reduce our green footprint, it seems natural to extend the same thought to our working life. Everyone’s been guilty of printing off the wrong document or accidentally printing duplicates and overtime this adds up. Research by Kyocera found that an average office worker in the UK uses around 45 pieces of copy paper daily and two-thirds is deemed as waste. With our demand for paper being said to double from 2005 to 2030, we need to act to prevent these predictions from becoming a reality.