Bundles of improvement with Bundledocs
Emily Cox, associate in the innovation-focused Legal Solutions Centre at Womble Bond Dickinson, explains why investing in Bundledocs to prepare complex court bundles collaboratively and digitally is such a clear win for her firm’s operational efficiency – while also adding value to firm-client relationships, internal development and teamwork.
The Covid-19 pandemic proved something of a ‘burning platform’ for a boom in tech-based process improvement at law firms, so goes the received wisdom — and with lawyers largely deprived of their piles of papers to shuffle through over successive lockdowns, appetite for future-focused digital and automated alternatives was effectively sharpened. In some cases, partners perhaps even bought into the idea that new modes of paperless collaboration might be preferable to proximity-dependent ways of the past.
But Womble Bond Dickinson, for one, had long been questioning how tools might transform the firm’s legal service offering — not least through the exploration of its Legal Solutions Centre (LSC). This team of more than 80 paralegals, chartered legal executives and experts in management information (MI) supports others at the firm to find more streamlined routes to efficient delivery of high-volume services — in areas such as real estate, commercial dispute resolution and large-scale contract review.
Emily Cox is an associate embedded in the LSC, focusing on such process improvement and contract lifecycle management work applied to employment law. Working at the intersection of law and legal technology, she has helped to introduce more automation to the business of reaching settlement agreements during redundancy exercises.
This saves employment lawyers’ time, potentially releasing them for more high-value work — and may reduce the cost of a service for a client. With her two hats on, Cox engages with clients, as well as internally, to identify and implement such opportunities.
From trial to trust in two weeks
However, one recent process change emerged as a “no brainer” rapidly, she says — the firm had to find a much more efficient method of building bundles required for court hearings. Even in 2019, this would often still be a very paper-intensive process — from early disclosure to the final document submission, completed in-house.
The pandemic dramatically changed this, inevitably forcing the profession down the path of e-disclosure. “Now all courts also wanted the ability to hyperlink from pages to witness statements, and firms needed to react quickly to enable it,” says Cox.
But the internal benefits of automating bundling are just as clear to her as the need to meet court requirements — until now this had been a very time-consuming manual process. The efforts of the firm’s paralegals could immediately be put to more productive use, and it also cut the cost of outsourcing any of the workload to third parties.
But while the firm’s immediate choice of a solution enabled the digital transition, it didn’t take long to learn that this wasn’t-fit for-purpose for the long-term. “The technology just wasn’t sufficient,” Cox explains. The system was regularly crashing under the weight of expectation. This is where cloud-based provider Bundledocs enters the picture — surfaced by a quick search of alternatives in the market.
“We ran a two-week trial and saw the efficiency of the process increase by around 50%,” she says. “It has since been a case of full steam ahead.”
A tool for all the talent
That efficiency boost is clearly the bottom line of the business case — but Cox believes the investment has also helped to deliver against several other business drivers.
First, there are client relationships: “It’s now more obviously cost-effective for our clients to trust us to do this work for a transparent price — a real value-add in the relationship,” she says.
Arguably, there’s also a certain reputational benefit to process improvement: “One judge in an IP case actually commented on the quality of our bundles.” This is apparently quite the unprecedented compliment — and entirely down to the technology’s range of functionality, she stresses.
“For example, it’s a matter of having both bookmarking and hyperlinking as options, which means judges can arrive at the detail they need by different routes.” But there’s also the overall reliability of the automation — lawyers don’t encounter any errors in the sequencing or page numbering, which was not always the case under the previous system.
There’s even an advantage in terms of talent strategy — investment in significantly labour-saving instances of tech also form something of an investment in people. The firm is effectively demonstrating it knows their time is precious and wants to support them to be productive. “Paralegals now know Bundledocs inside out. The training required depends on the task, but the operation is very straightforward — it integrates well with other systems, such as document management — and we’ve used it as a training tool for both our solicitor apprentices and those receiving work experience at the firm. Increasing understanding and appreciation of technology in modern legal services can be one lever of social mobility progress for the profession.”
The final word is collaboration — Cox praises the Bundledocs team’s proactive customer service (both effective online chat facility, and very timely human support), regular updates as required, and an openness to feedback from the firm about potential improvements such as the best ways of linking between sets of pages.
“We want to work closely with our technology providers,” she says — which could be seen as an extension of the approach the LSC tries to promote right around the firm — supporting others to enquire and find efficiencies by which everybody ultimately benefits.
The world of working with Bundledocs also fits well into this “collaborator mode” — all involved in a case having the ability to add documents or their comments on the contents at their convenience. They can potentially build some stronger team bonds and a remarkably efficient bundle at the same time.
