Updating Transactions

When law firm Cripps realised its profitable property management practice was in need of a process upgrade, the firm looked to its existing technology provider for a solution. Innovation manager Rob Tyler and partner Ben Johnston outline the ways Peppermint Technology helped guide the firm towards a better reporting and document automation solution.

Published in Briefing Frontiers 2022

Though Cripps had been experiencing significant success in its high-volume commercial property practice in recent years, innovation manager Rob Tyler explains, there was a problem at the heart of the firm’s processes. “Clients really valued the relationship and the service we provided. But our people were at risk of burning out trying to deliver.”

With many processes becoming outdated and inefficient, the team recognised the need for a change. “We wanted to improve profitability while maintaining a high level of service,” says partner Ben Johnston.

Addressing these challenges fell to the firm’s Spark innovation process, which kicked into high gear looking for a solution. “We wanted to link our solution theme to our strategic objectives. Those include growth, but another is to be a people-centric business. Improving the morale of your people is absolutely essential to that goal, so we wanted to make processes easier for everyone,” says Tyler.

Improving transaction visibility

One of the trickiest challenges was improving client reporting, which relied on an unwieldy and outdated process. “We do weekly reports with 10–15 clients, and for each of those we may deal with between 10 and 100 matters. A single Word document or Excel spreadsheet that constitutes a report might have 20–25 team members contributing to it – and they’d have to open a report and hope someone else wasn’t already in it. It was a huge headache,” says Johnston.

“We wanted to link our solution theme to our strategic objectives. Those include growth, but another is to be a people-centric business. Improving the morale of your people is absolutely essential to that goal, so we wanted to make processes easier for everyone”

Rob Tyler, innovation manager, Cripps

In addition to this, the firm also wanted to improve visibility on transactions, and give legal team members a single, unified view of information needed in reports, Johnston adds.

Finally, as an added efficiency requirement, the firm had been considering the implementation of document automation, as the process of drafting relevant documents, such as tenancy documents or leases for landlords, was also adding to the inefficiencies it was grappling with. In order to address these, Tyler explains, the firm approached a number of vendors with its vision for a solution, including a “storyboard” for the future client journey. Fortunately, they didn’t have to look far. As Cripps was an existing client of Peppermint Technology (for the past seven years), Tyler explains, the vendor already had a grasp of how the firm worked and was able to guide it through the process of adding document automation and transaction management into the mix.

At first, he explains, the firm began looking at onboarding Peppermint’s CX365 product – but Tyler says it soon became apparent this wasn’t the best way to proceed. “We realised we’d have to develop document automation and transaction management in a vacuum, away from the tools we were already using. Instead, we decided to leverage the existing capabilities in Peppermint – that was a lightbulb moment, because we could start making an immediate, incremental impact. Everyone was comfortable with that level of risk, and we could still lift the toolset up into the new world of Peppermint CX365 when we were ready.”

Peppermint was able to outline in advance what migrating from the extant version of the software to the newer, Microsoft Power Platform-based CX365 version would entail, allowing both an immediate solution and preparation for the future, Tyler adds. “We got an impression of where to avoid developing the technology, so we won’t have to completely rebuild when it comes time to move over to CX365.”

“We are seeing the needle moving in the right direction for commercial real estate, but it goes beyond just seeing encouraging stats – people don’t dread coming in on a Friday because of how inefficient the reporting processes are”

Ben Johnston, partner, Cripps

Once the firm is ready to do so, however, he says Cripps will benefit from all Microsoft 365 toolsets. “Once you’re there, you can leverage low-code and no-code automation, plus all the AI tools embedded in there. We’ve been looking at using that to lift information from heads of terms and automate documents for five to six years.”

Results

Having worked on a two-week sprint methodology to create a minimum viable product on transaction management and document automation, with input direct from clients and from people in the firm who would actually be using the tool, Tyler says the positive impact on business efficiencies is noticeable. The document automation tool has delivered 67% time-saving on first drafts of documents, he says – and that figure increases to 100% in some instances. “We are seeing the needle moving in the right direction for commercial real estate, but it goes beyond just seeing encouraging stats – people don’t dread coming in on a Friday because of how inefficient the reporting processes are,” Johnston adds.

Furthermore, he says those additional hours, for both secretarial staff and fee earners, have had a positive snowball effect. “We’ve saved something like 100 to 150 hours for our fee earners over the last six months – that’s time reinvested into relationships, but also they’re not having to work until 10pm just to fulfil those transactions.”

Johnston adds that the transaction tool means lawyers no longer have to spend time entering transaction information, as client support teams are now able to do that. He adds: “It’s allowed lawyers to canter through every single transaction that we’re dealing with for a particular client while they’re on the phone, across matters.” And, with the firm looking to move up to CX365 in the near future, further efficiencies are likely round the corner.