Shouldn't your software be able to take the years of expertise your staff has acquired, and like pieces of a puzzle, build a complete picture over all legal processes your firm implements manually, and automate them?
Traditionally, legal practices have adopted any number of document management and CRM software tools, to insure quality service delivery to clients. While these systems vary in the benefits they offer, there is one common drawback that is found in most; they continue to rely heavily on experienced staff members to drive the use and effectiveness of these solutions and to manually ensure all the proper steps are being taken at the appropriate time. Thus all Risk within the practice rests on the professionalism of each and every staff member, working together as a team. But what happens if a key member of staff is taken ill, or decides to find employment elsewhere? What happens if they take key information with them?
An emerging trend in next generation case management systems is to provide Workflows to incorporate key staff member expertise into the software. These Workflows go beyond conventional “Case Plans” (which are simply a means of sequencing Precedent documents), and focus on optimising work processes, enforcing business rules, accelerating transactions, and reducing the risk of missing critical dates. Their focus is on waste reduction and improving efficiency at a system level; this is exactly what Legal Evolve's Workflow feature offers.
Cook County Illinois and Next Generation Case Management
One example of how Legal Evolve's case management Workflow capabilities have been put to use, is at Cook County’s Office of Adoption and Child Care Advocacy department (OACCA) in Chicago, USA. The OACCA handles all Adoption, Custody and Probate cases in northern Illinois (for a population of 18 million people). This sensitive and process intensive department deals with a huge volume of documentation from the courts, attorneys and parents on a daily bases. In addition to this, it is the responsibility of the department to ensure due diligence when determining the proper care for each child.
In the past, this entire process has relied exclusively on individual Case Workers, and physical paper files; resulting in an extremely labor intensive and time consuming process, involving the compilation of documentation from disparate sources, and an inability to proactively measure performance metrics. Angela Bailey, director of OACCA commented, “Everything was paper…weekly schedules, editing and creating documents.”
Without a facility to properly manage communications, documentation, records storage and case management across a growing level of adoptions, custody and probate filings, there were plenty of customer service and internal organisational opportunities being missed…In 2010, the OACCA department succesfully implemented Documatics' Legal Evolve™.
Automating Processes using Workflows
The many pieces of the puzzle that make up the day-to-day running of the OACCA, i.e. the practices and procedures, are now explicitly defined within Legal Evolve™ and are no longer the sole responsibility of key staff members, thereby removing the associated risk of being solely the responsibility of an individual. Any new case created within the system, results in a series of Workflows being automatically initiated, each designed to ensure that all aspects of the case are controlled and managed. Furthermore, as the practices and procedures of the department change, so too can the Workflows within the software be readily changed.
Legal Evolve™'s Workflow system enables the automated creation and completion of data onto documents, the timely roll out of case requirements and provides common task-driven activities for users to follow from the start to finish of every case. This ensures that the right steps are followed and the right people are informed at all times.
As a case progresses through each Workflow, real time status information can be relayed to the case, ensuring management reports are available to the department, and are accurate and timely.
