Virtual experiences are the primary way in which law firms engage with their clients, with in-person engagement now a rarity. This means there’s little room to hide from the legal technology platform your firm uses to engage and collaborate with your corporate counsel clients.
Furthermore, your clients are under enormous pressure to maintain business resilience during the global health crisis. They are valuing responsiveness and seamless online connectivity from their external legal advisers. This presents law firm advisers with unique opportunities.
This was a theme explored in a Thomson Reuters panel discussion on legal business resilience held last month, where David Johnson, Account Director, Acritas, noted the shifting priorities of General Counsel in the Asia-Pacific region. Their top three priorities in the three months to July were ‘safeguarding and preventative’, ‘improving effectiveness’ and ‘efficiency’.
Successful firms are offering their clients unique service delivery experiences and aligning them to their priorities as mentioned above, including via HighQ, the project management and collaboration platform. In this article, we outline three virtual experiences that can be had via HighQ, which will help meet your clients’ needs.
1. Safe and secure online engagement
Many General Counsel are operating in a highly volatile environment due to the economic uncertainty global health crisis. But to make matters worse, they are guiding their organisation through a period of heightened cyber security risks. As a law firm adviser, you’ll want to give your clients one less thing to worry about. If you collaborate with them safely and securely, your clients will have the peace of mind that their data and confidential information is in trusted hands.
Take Corrs Chambers Westgarth as one example who has successfully factored this into their clients’ experiences. The independent, client-driven legal partnership employs more than 600 lawyers, including 120 partners. Before adopting HighQ (which, by the way is ISO 27001 certified), Corrs Chambers Westgarth was looking for a SaaS platform that would remove the burden of software maintenance, licensing or upgrades, so they could focus on the needs of their clients. On top of this, security was a must-have.
In a client interview with Thomson Reuters, Berys Amor, Director of Technology and Jason Jones, Client Technology Solutions Manager said:
“As a starting point, we wanted to make sure we could encrypt all data on individual clients’ sites produced through HighQ. We didn’t want the encryption keys to be stored in the cloud alongside the data.”
“HighQ’s flexible and robust cloud security enabled us to do that with ease, giving us full control. Having that enhanced cloud security really was the tipping-point in the firm selecting HighQ as our platform of choice.”
– Berys Amor, Director of Technology and Jason Jones, Client Technology Solutions Manager, Corrs Chambers Westgarth
Furthermore, Berys and Jason said that the Collaborate module within HighQ has enabled them to go the extra mile for the client via streamlined bespoke legal advice experiences. Sounds like an A+ level of client service delivery, doesn’t it?
2. Rolling market insights and legal updates
According to Acritas, a trusted global provider of market insights, there are three additional things that firms can be doing to support their clients in H2. This feedback comes from extensive interviews that Acritas conducted with legal counsel in the region (who are buyers of law firm services). The consensus among legal counsel were on these areas of improvement:
- Proactive knowledge sharing
- Timely, relevant advice
- Efficient, effective service
Let’s talk about proactive knowledge sharing, which Acritas notes can be demonstrated through newsletters, webinars and the interpretation of new legislation. How do you convey this to your clients without having to call in the web developers? If you do not have a robust and easy-to-update publishing platform which can handle the rafts of communications you are looking to make, your firm can delegate this to the HighQ platform.
Nicola Dullard, Jackson McDonald’s Senior Business Development and Marketing Manager, realised this as an opportunity for her firm this year. Nicola utilised HighQ to build the law firm’s brand new Corporate Website. Uploading content onto the platform and publishing only takes five minutes and can be syndicated across any part of the site in real time. Client engagement has been unprecedented as a result, with Nicola citing that streamlining their content has informed the content strategy and allowed the firm to be more responsive and flexible, particularly in the climate of COVID-19.
“When we made our HighQ investment, we essentially future-proofed our business in that respect.”
– Nicola Dullard, Senior Business Development and Marketing Manager, Jackson McDonald
*Acritas was proudly acquired by Thomson Reuters in 2019.
3. Single interface client engagement
The ‘legal tech stack’ seems to expand every year, with many law firms setting innovation goals and championing the use of working smarter within the firm. Part of what makes a technology or client service delivery innovative, is simplifying complex tasks or ways of working. Being mindful of this, you want your clients to have a seamless experience with the technology you engage them with – or require they use – in order to collaborate with you.
HighQ lifts the burden of having to switch from one software to the other, thanks to its open-API functionality. APIs enable technologies to integrate and communicate with each other without blockages, which facilitates a free-flowing user experience.
For instance, within HighQ’s interface, you can seamlessly access Contract Express templates to generate documents. For instance, should you generate a document with a Contract Express template within HighQ, the document would move through the next stage of the workflow within the single platform.
Processes like these are not only of benefit to your firm’s efficiency, but your client’s experience, too. Forget about providing your client with multiple logins. All they’ll need is a user instance set up in your firm’s HighQ platform, and they will have access to what you have provided for them, from files to documents and legal briefing updates.
Have these virtual wow-factors sparked your interest in optimising your virtual workplace? Speak with a Thomson Reuters specialist to discover HighQ for law firms.
