Law Firm Centre of Excellence Model Boosted by BigHand

BigHand has released its latest case study with leading US law firm Larkin Hoffman. As the legal industry continues to face rising client pressure for work to be completed more cost-effectively, the firm began to evolve its support staff structures to be more operationally efficient. The restructuring of their support teams has been successfully aided by the implementation of BigHand Workflow Management.

The implementation has provided Larkin Hoffman visibility into work allocation, enabling Legal Administrative Assistants (LAA) to support attorneys across multiple practice areas and allowing the team to complete more tasks over time with more efficient workflows. “The expectation is that legal administrative support specialists can support anybody in the company with whatever they need,” says Brenda Greenhalgh, Legal Administrative Support Manager. “By this time, we were already considering workflow management solutions to support hybrid working. We also wanted a solution we could use to identify tasks that were common to all LAAs so that we could begin assigning them routinely to the new administrative support team.”

Larkin Hoffman selected BigHand’s Workflow Management solution after a recommendation from a consultant and guest speaker on a webinar that Brenda attended. “We were already using BigHand’s dictation solution, so implementing Workflow Management was a natural next step. We had only had positive experiences with BigHand,” says Brenda. “So, we got in touch, and the rest, as they say, is history.”

The firm has also used the solution to tailor several workflows so that, depending on the task, it is routed to the LAA who is most experienced and qualified to complete it, so much so that paralegals and first-year associates new to the firm are no longer assigned to a specific LAA. Larkin Hoffman has adopted a Center of Excellence model to establish such workflows and to encourage knowledge sharing amongst the teams.

The increase in efficiency has quickened service delivery times and has improved the firm's client relationships. Larkin Hoffman can provide clients with more transparency into how their matters are handled and are better equipped to handle requests from clients wanting more cost-effective legal work.

BigHand Workflow Management has been crucial to the change management process at Larkin Hoffman. As they moved to a hybrid work environment and restructured their support teams for increased productivity and efficiency, BigHand’s solutions can provide them with the visibility and processes needed to ensure long-term success.