Posted by Craig Matthews, chief executive of Legal Futures Associate Osprey Approach
Matthews: You need to showcase your improvements
Demonstrating the proactive steps your firm has taken to mitigate risk, improve productivity and efficiency, implement quality control processes, and enhance the long-term stability of your practice is more important now than ever.
With professional indemnity insurance (PII) premiums ever-rising, your firm may be hit with impossibly high costs if you’re unable to show the improvements made to your firm over the last year.
Broker Lockton reported in its review of the spring 2021 renewal season that the average increase for the primary layer of PII cover was 27% compared to 17% last year, highlighting the impact of the pandemic on the industry.
Continuously improving and collating the data to evidence the impact is costly, and almost impossible, without the right technology in place. Practice and case management software (PCMS) should be the foundation of your firm for you to effectively meet best practices and standards.
PCMS enables you to implement standardised processes, reduce manual admin and provide firm-wide visibility so you can easily monitor and manage the performance and profitability of your practice.
With the right PCMS in place, you can lean on technology to make improving your processes easier and showcasing those improvements in your PII proposal. Discover how a PCMS can positively impact your PII proposal as well improve overall profitability and success.
Five ways PCMS can aid the PII proposal process
Centralises your data for a single source of truth
Digitalising your data and documents in a centralised PCMS provides an accurate, single source of truth for your firm to work from. It ensures everyone within the firm is working to the same data, which can be easily accessed from one secure platform.
This reduces the need for duplicating data entry between systems, online and offline, which decreases errors and provides an up-to-date solution for the entire practice to work from.
Additional business tools and legal software solutions can typically be integrated with a PCMS helping to centralise and connect all processes within your firm aiding efficiency, accuracy, and productivity too.
Streamlines compliance tasks
PCMS makes staying compliant easier, helping implement best practice and compliance tasks into your team’s daily workload.
From digital risk assessments to GDPR and due diligence functionality and much more besides will help to ensure you are meeting compliance requirements. This also means reporting on and showing evidence of your compliance procedures is easier because all your data and processes are centralised in a single digital platform.
Streamlining your compliance tasks using a PCMS means you can monitor and manage your processes from any location too, perfect for hybrid and remote teams.
Standardises processes with automated workflows
Automated workflows are a great way to boost efficiency and productivity because they reduce manual admin. But importantly, for your PII proposals, they help to standardise processes across your firm to aid with compliance, improve professionalism and client service.
Workflows set out all the key actions within a task, such as the file opening process, to ensure nothing is missed and that everyone within the firm is following the same processes.
This has two major benefits. Firstly, it reduces errors and mistakes because processes are clearly mapped out and its clear which stage of the process a case is on. Secondly, it enables an agreed, standardised set of actions, templates, wording and branding to be used throughout each process for data capture, documents, and forms so you can be confident you are always offering a compliant and professional service to your clients.
Provides visibility for data-driven planning
A centralised database of documents, files and data from clients, cases and financials help to build accurate reporting and insight for clear firm-wide visibility.
When your data is connected and easily accessible, it provides your COLP and COFA with information to effectively monitor and manage performance, meaning crucially they can identify potential issues before they arise, helping to mitigate compliance risks.
Reporting and business intelligence tools also provide data-driven insight that help to improve performance across all areas of a firm. The data-driven insight then enables accurate forecasting and planning so you can better allocate resource and have a clear view of the breakdown of work your firm completed and accurate forecasts of the firm’s future performance.
This helps to produce a clearer PII proposal, which can reduce premiums for higher risk areas of law.
Improves business continuity and data security
Digitalising and centralising your processes and documents in a cloud-based PCMS means teams can effectively work from home and clients served no matter their location.
A cloud-hosted solution also opens opportunities to use a client portal to communicate and collaborate with clients, so they also have accurate and centralised data and document storage.
When your firm is no longer reliant on physical files and servers, you’re more agile and can adapt to challenges if the worst should happen and you can’t access your office.
The data and cyber security measures put in place in cloud-hosted environments also ensure your data is protected and reduces your firm’s reliance on the post and email, which are easily intercepted, thereby increasing the security around your clients’ sensitive data.
Future-proof your firm with practice and case management software
Implementing solid digital foundations helps to future-proof your firm and improve its long-term stability because you’re able to stay agile, flexible, and adaptable to change.
Easily show you firm is taking risk seriously and that you’re a professionally run firm by taking advantage of technology to standardise tasks, follow best practice and meet compliance requirements through workflows and powerful PCMS functionality.
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