By Legal Futures Associate Advanced
About Civitas Law
Based in Cardiff, Civitas Law is the leading specialist civil and public law barristers’ chambers in Wales. They are an award-winning set and have been ranked as a Top Tier set in The Legal 500 and a Leading Set in Chambers’ UK Bar Guide.
They are recognised by the Bar, and their clients, for their excellence, innovation, strong in-depth advisory work, drafting, mediation and advocacy. Established in 2008, their ethos is based on their founding and progressive principles – to be at the heart of the evolution of legal services and society and to provide outstanding legal advice to all of
their clients.
Their Advanced experience
Civitas Law has used MLC for a number of years. Recently they made a full upgrade from a hosted system to Azure Office 365, incorporating Mobile MLC and Case Collaboration (OneDrive). We spoke with Sandra Harvey, Senior Clerk, about the change. She explained: “The main benefit for us has been the integration of OneDrive. It’s provided us with several advantages, including the ability to move toward paperless working”.
“It’s also enhanced our service to solicitor clients, as it’s now so much easier for them to share large volumes of information with us. We simply send them a secure link directly from the case record and they can instantly update and share documents with us. Any uploaded files
go directly into the case record, and both clerks and barristers are automatically notified that they’ve been received. This is very useful for both parties.”
We asked how easy it was to adapt to using OneDrive and Sandra replied: “We did set up training sessions and Advanced also provided us with training guides. To be honest, it was so easy to use that some barristers just read the guides and got on with it. It’s very straightforward”.
Moving onto the MLC, we spoke to Sandra about her user experience. She said: “The system is easy to use. Since moving to Azure, I’ve had additional sessions with our Advanced training consultant and that’s hugely beneficial. I’ve discovered that MLC has far more capability than we were using. By introducing previously unexplored functions we’ve saved a lot of time and made life that little bit easier for the clerks team”.
“Upgrading our platform has given us access to all of the efficiency that Mobile MLC and Case Collaboration on OneDrive can offer. We’ve saved so much time and improved our client experience.” – Sandra Harvey, Senior Clerk, Civitas Law
Was implementation of the new platform smooth?
“It was very, very good. While a lot was going on in the background, users just continued as they normally would. The communication
from our Advanced project manager was excellent. I was given clear step-by-step instructions at every stage, making it easy for me to keep our barristers informed whenever they needed to update anything like user permissions.”
Key benefits of MLC?
Efficiency is the main factor. One example is the time recording in Mobile MLC. Now I can process a week’s time records in about an hour and a half. The billing process is much quicker now and barristers have better access to their billing information. We used to outsource billing, but we’ve moved it back into the clerks room – so it’s saving us both time and money.
