Agile advice blog: Are you enough?
As the full implications of Covid-19 start to be felt across the legal industry, and as we take our first tentative steps to reopening offices, the need for greater resilience and agility in our business model and service delivery has become paramount. And it has brought two important questions to the fore: just how agile is your firm, and is it enough?
This last couple of months have been the biggest experiment in agile working the world has ever seen, challenging the status quo, potentially for ever, and making us look even closer at how we do business, how we enable and support our staff, and how we serve and support the clients. What have we learned, what has to change, how do we make our firm stronger as we exit?
Is this the Rubicon moment for agile working and the agile law firm? With the challenges of social distancing rules, travel restrictions, staff wellbeing and safety guidelines all adding to the mix, longlasting change is inevitable, but with it comes opportunity. To paraphrase Darwin, it is not the strongest that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.
For the last five years DMC Canotec has been driving the agile agenda with our popular AgileFirm events sharing best practice and customer insights on embracing change. Over 200 firms attended this year. For now these events are virtual, such as the launch of our forthcoming AgileExpo series and regular AgileToolkit webinars, but the advice, insight and experience gained from partnering with over 100 of the UK’s leading firms, allows us to share a proven path to enabling effective digital transformation and the agile law firm.
Our latest seven-step guide, The New Workplace, offers practical tips for a safe and secure return to the workplace, supporting a hybrid workforce, where many will still, for now, be working from home as the new norm.
Agile in actionWe recently worked with two top firms on their agile/digital transformation strategies.
Weightmans – Digital Mailroom, MatterSphere workflow“The solution has enabled Weightmans to deliver documents directly into digital workflows to support our users, wherever they are – a secure, agile, collaborative and efficient service supporting the continuity of service to our clients, despite the challenges we all face right now. DMC Canotec, Paper River and Weightmans worked really well together and developed a real camaraderie. From 85% of our firm being in an office on any given day we had fewer than 15 people across eight offices within a week, with everyone supported and working effectively from home” – Stuart Whittle, partner and head of IS and operations
Withers Worldwide – Digital Mailroom, iManage workflow and Managed Print Service“Our Paperlite Document Solutions from DMC Canotec have been a game changer for agile working, especially right now during these most challenging of times, enabling us to deliver documents and information quickly and efficiently in an electronic format so our lawyers, secretaries and other support staff are able to work remotely from anywhere. This proved to be extremely helpful at the start of the crisis and helped Withers move to full remote working far quicker than would have been the case without the technology” – Peter Gibbons, global head of facilities.
