Community for change: Partner for Windows product manager at Tikit, gives firms a full view of the ecosystem
No business can survive in the market today, it seems, without innovating their products or services. But sometimes that move towards innovation can be slow because of the cost or time to implement. This means many firms could be losing out on that innovation advantage.
‘Innovation’ is quite a suggestive word, ask anyone what it means and there will be a different definition each time, says Alex Williams, Partner for Windows (P4W) product manager at Tikit.
“Innovation is a key element of Tikit’s ecosystem – P4W is not only about its core functionality as a practice management system but by integrating with the best-of-breed providers it gives firms acompetitive advantage to increasing customer satisfaction and efficiency.”
With P4W as a firm’s central platform, he says, departments that need specialist information or technology – for example, a fee earner needing to do a conveyancing search or one who doesn’t have time to manually transcribe their dictations – can leverage best-of-breed providers who already have strong systems in place to get the job done.
Williams says: “Law firms have the opportunity to address what is causing issues for the business by utilising P4W’s ecosystem to get through those challenges and create efficiencies across the practice.”
Kingdom of whizzes
Integrating P4W with best-of-breed products has created a market-leading practice and case management ecosystem of products, says Williams. “There’s a definite culture change hitting the SME legal market at the moment – previously they haven’t really had access to such a broad range of technologies compared with the UK top 100.”
SME firms are starting to pick up innovative technologies and are becoming more adaptable to change – automation, digitisation and smarter working are all very ripe for harvest. Williams says P4W integrations are about seamlessly passing data and reducing the administrative requirement to rekey that data. For example, last year P4W partnered up with InfoTrack, which has specialist conveyancing capabilities.
“Electronic submissions are instantly available and the firm can easily track the order’s progress. Since that data is passed between P4W and InfoTrack automatically, there is no need for resupplying information across different platforms. With fee earners receiving updates it allows them to manage their matter progress more efficiently and address issues instantaneously that requires intervention” he adds.
Not just InfoTrack, but all of P4W integrations work to support law firms in daily tasks and help them adapt to smarter ways of working, Williams adds. For instance, Adobe Sign, part of the ecosystem, is a simple but crucial service that automates the process to get documents digitally signed by end-clients.
Later this year, Tikit is set to expand its ecosystem and launch an integration between P4W and The Link App – those who watch the Apprentice may be familiar with contestant Lauren Riley’s communication and mobility solution for lawyers. Williams says there are many ways that using Tikit P4W allows firms’ structures to become more mobile.
There’s a lot to be leveraged with two-way case and document management syncing using P4W’s integration with NetDocuments, allowing fee earners to continue work on documents outside the office (the first integration between a CMS and DMS of its kind in EMEA). But also with desktop and mobile time recording (Carpe Diem), financial insights and dictations (BigHand), document sharing platforms (Workshare) and so on.
This article appears in LPM magazine. To read the full article, download your copy of LPM June 2018: Power play here.