Take Product Tour
Book a demo
Book a demo
Book a demo

Horwich Farrelly selects ShareDo to accelerate growth

sharedo on June 10, 2022

Following an extremely competitive selection process, we are delighted to announce that ShareDo has been selected to replace Horwich Farrelly’s existing Visualfiles case management system.

Horwich Farrelly explained that they felt ShareDo was “a country mile ahead of competitors” in terms of the platform, its configurability, and the expertise of the team. Working in a very competitive and highly automated space, Horwich Farrelly requires a solution that can maintain their margins, manage their complex workflows and data requirements in a variety of practice areas, whilst, most importantly, providing their customers with the digital experience they demand.

ShareDo will be implemented across all practice areas over the next 18 months, completely retiring their existing solution.

ShareDo’s Head of Sales, Sebastian Negreira commented:

David Bennett, Head of IT at Birkett Long, said:

“We are delighted to be working with the Horwich Farrelly team and be part of their ambitious growth plans. Very early on in the process, it was clear to see that they have a highly competent team, who really understood the vision of ShareDo and who were excited with how the product could transform their business.”

About ShareDo

ShareDo is a legal case management platform that enables lawyers to achieve superhuman results. It creates more time by making light work of countless daily tasks, leaving you laser-focused on delivering the best outcomes for your clients.

Built using the best technology stack to solve today’s business problems, ShareDo improves law firm’s productivity and efficiency to help drive successful client outcomes.

Today, ShareDo is the fastest growing CMS in the UK, experiencing continuous year-on-year growth as more and more law firms are switching to its disruptive technology platform.

Learn more about us at sharedo.co.uk

IBB Law selects ShareDo as their strategic case management system for a firm-wide implementation

sharedo on May 31, 2022

IBB Law identified a need for a case management system to bring a consistent approach to managing work across the business whilst enabling practice groups to specialise and adapt to the work they carry out.

The first phase of the project is to focus on IBB Law’s Real Estate team, who are looking to ShareDo to aid the team in delivering their work more efficiently and consistently. Not only does ShareDo provide a platform for capturing information at the appropriate point in the workflow, but also it ensures that information is only requested once and is kept up to date as the transaction progresses to completion. To improve the client journey further, IBB Law will be using ShareDo to provide a rich portal experience for clients and give the client greater transparency on the progress of their transactions.

IBB Law’s aim is to be completely self-sufficient on the ShareDo application, utilising the platform’s advanced automation and workflow capabilities to improve life cycle of cases, reduce the costs of delivering their legal services, and allow the lawyers to focus more on delivering their excellent legal expertise to clients without getting unnecessarily bogged down by admin tasks.

Sam Luxford-Watts – IT Director at IBB Law said:
“We started talking to ShareDo in 2019, but COVID-19 struck shortly after which meant that IBB had to focus on different priorities for the next couple of years. However, the conversation between ShareDo and IBB Law still continued, and we were delighted to be able to get the project off the starting blocks this year. Through our various discussions, ShareDo stood out not only as a very capable piece of software, but because of the synergy in mindset between our two teams on how the client journey can be improved through the appropriate application of technology.”

About ShareDo

ShareDo is a legal case management platform that enables lawyers to achieve superhuman results. It creates more time by making light work of countless daily tasks, leaving you laser-focused on delivering the best outcomes for your clients.

Built using the best technology stack to solve today’s business problems, ShareDo improves law firm’s productivity and efficiency to help drive successful client outcomes.

Today, ShareDo is the fastest growing CMS in the UK, experiencing continuous year-on-year growth as more and more law firms are switching to its disruptive technology platform.

Learn more about us at sharedo.co.uk

Six small but powerful ways to help your lawyers do more each day

sharedo on April 19, 2022

Introduction

Competitive pressures, juggling client expectations and the age-old challenge to “do more for less” affects the legal services sector like any other industry.

But with the scarcity of legal talent driving law firms to do even more each day within existing headcount, the problem is exacerbated and unlikely to resolve itself anytime soon.

Tech “done right” can play a huge role in enabling lawyers to streamline and super-charge performance and, ultimately, be more profitable.

Here’s six ways in which we are helping thousands of lawyers be more efficient and achieve super-human results to out-perform their competitors.

1. Go with the flow and avoid ‘context switching’

“Fear is not the mind-killer, context switching is the mind-killer.”
Elon Musk

Many have called this now legendary Clubhouse livestream comment by one of the great entrepreneurial innovators of our time as a deeply profound statement.

What Musk means is that when we are constantly switching from one task to another, our productivity, and indeed our mind, is destroyed. Put simply, we are constantly breaking our natural flow and jeopardising the successful completion of each task.

While we agree that Musk’s observation goes to the very heart of one of modern life’s biggest impediments, it’s not a new phenomenon. We’re positively fixated on addressing this very issue and have spent the last five years and more on developing technology solutions to improve and enhance flow time for legal firms.

So how does ShareDo help with context switching?

ShareDo prioritises your workload, enabling you to quickly see the most pressing task that requires your focus at any single point in time. It constantly adapts and re-prioritises tasks as matters evolve, giving you the right focus at the right time.

ShareDo also monitors your work against critical success factors. If something changes, such as a task is soon to be overdue or how now been flagged as more urgent, it alerts you. And, importantly, it provides you with any supporting tools and contextual help to reduce the likelihood of switching to a different task.

Just like we would recommend you do with other technology apps like e-mail, Slack and Teams, ShareDo also lets you “mute” notifications to avoid that ever-present curse of context switching. This can be set at a granular level, so you can again minimise any breaks in flow.

However much we may think that we’ve reached legendary status in multi-tasking, our brains cannot focus on two sources of input at one time.

2. Delegate tasks and optimise your resource levels

Outside of the “lawyering” to be done on a matter, there are many activities which can be delegated to support staff, shared service centres or processing teams. Activities such as compliance activities, litigation and post completion support require a lot of resource to complete.

Given the scarcity of legal talent, it’s imperative for your lawyers to be able to delegate these tasks quickly and reliably. Added to this, you need to be confident that tasks are delegated safe in the knowledge that your key people will be kept informed of their outcome.

ShareDo provides an ‘instant delegate’ function for all activity, alongside resourcing dashboards and notifications so you can keep track of progress and overall performance.

But managing traffic of work is only half the picture.

Implementing a shared service centre using ShareDo is an excellent way to centralise common processes and provide relief for fee-earners from repetitive non-legal tasks. Again, they’ll always remain up-to-date on progress and vital information.

This brings a real step-change to our client’s overall performance. But there is more that can be achieved by automating the allocation of these tasks through ‘allocation rules’ that makes the whole process even more streamlined.

ShareDo brings extra power to your people and operations through an accumulation of incremental improvements to how you collaborate

3. Great UX saves many minutes, many times each day

When you think about user experience (UX) in digital platforms, you may mistakenly think about a slickly designed user interface (UI) or quick loading app.

UX is about much more than this.

It’s about applying a deep understanding of how people can best interact with your platform to complete tasks and collaborate with others to be more successful. It’s about focusing on people’s needs and making every task they complete as streamlined and as intuitive as possible.

Optimising case interactions can shave minutes off every single process, each and every time it is undertaken. These frequently saved minutes quickly add up to huge savings. Minutes that enable your fee-earners to achieve the super-human results they thrive on.

Most case management systems are designed to be the key operational system for your internal staff and the platform they will be using for a good proportion of each day. Poorly designed case management systems often do more harm than good. They not only frustrate your people but can lead to above average employee attrition. Needless to say, it is imperative that user experience is “front of mind” for a case management system.

ShareDo’s UX is designed explicitly for legal teams and individuals. Designed and built from the ground up, it is not a by-product of a software platform designed for a different purpose. Instead, every ‘line of code’ has been written and continually optimised to streamline for legal processes. This is why we confidently describe ShareDo as being “designed for you”.

Truly great UX, however, recognises that not all ‘users’ are the same. In addition to varying job roles, they will have different needs, skills and preferred styles of working to name but a few.

ShareDo is powered by a unique ‘persona engine’ that enables the personalisation of every single interaction by role and user type.

4. Unprecedented levels of ‘Automated Precedents’

Why reinvent the wheel when you can press a button and have a document generated for you in seconds.

ShareDo contains advanced automated document assembly functionality to enable every member of your team to “do more for less”.

Most routine operation – whether simple or multi-faceted – is automated, transferring further minutes of time to fee-earning activities.

5. Seamless sharing and clever collaboration

You’ve created a brilliant piece of legal advice and need to share it. But, as is often the case, time is limited, and it’s put aside for when you have more time to do this. Time that will never come.

Just like any other form of interaction, ShareDo makes it easy to save time and seamlessly share this with relevant groups, saving you that all important time and avoidance of dreaded context switching.

As the name suggests, ShareDo makes sharing easy. Within a couple of clicks or drag-and-drop of your mouse, you can send files via DocuSign, email, outsourced post, or share materials via a Virtual Dataroom, safe in the knowledge that external access is secure and strictly controlled.

6. Automate to save time

Probably the most effective way to save time is to simply to get the “machine” to do the work for you.

By automating key steps in your processes – or indeed the whole process – you can significantly boost your “lawyering” capacity.

The key is to automate appropriately for you “work style”, as different user groups and different practice groups will need varying degrees of automation. That’s why ShareDo advance workflow capabilities enable you to support different work management styles across your business.

+1. Save an hour a day

At ShareDo, we’re all about the +1s, and this list-based article is no different!

Imagine what you could do if you had an additional working hour each day?

Bill more.
Contribute to practice-wide initiatives.
Update your knowledge management.
Focus on client service improvements.
Support a colleague.
Something else?

……..Or (whisper it) simply feel less pressure.

Many of our clients set themselves the challenge of ‘saving an hour a day’ – a bold statement, perhaps, but one that is achievable when you look holistically at the savings that could be achieved.

Challenge our claims

If you would like to join the ‘Hour a Day Challenge’ then please contact us for a consultation via one of the routes below.

Top 7 Critical Success Factors for Implementing Case and Matter Management Successfully

sharedo on April 19, 2022

When ‘done right’, your case or matter management system (CMS) quickly becomes a critical part of your business. As a fundamental cornerstone, it can deliver process improvement to all practice areas and provide outstanding operational insight across your business.

However, despite your very best of intentions, if your CMS is poorly designed or badly implemented for you, it can do more harm than good. It could either be improperly used, resulting in costly and time-consuming errors that frustrate your clients and employees, or it won’t be used sufficiently to deliver a strong return on investment.

We’ve spent the last five years building a reputation for personalising and implementing first rate case management systems for legal organisations across the UK and beyond. While we’re always learning, here’s the top critical success factors to get right to ensure you experience a successful CMS implementation.

1. Manage change effectively

True and lasting change has historically been very difficult to achieve in the legal Industry. Natural resistance tends to be high and adoption rates being very low. And that’s before we factor in change management as a discipline being at its infancy within many firms. With Change Management being cited as the single most important factor for a project’s success, its importance cannot be under-estimated.

Effective change management requires more than just effective communications or an analytical focus on detailed requirements gathering. Instead, change management should be considered as its own specialist discipline. Its lens should be firmly focused on understanding the motivations and behaviours of those that you are attempting to impact and addressing them appropriately. It is a discipline that is constantly evolving and borrows much from psychology and behavioural science.

2. Engage your stakeholders

Your subject matter experts (SMEs) and key stakeholders are lawyers who are by their very nature extremely time poor. To engage them effectively you need to:

1. Understand their process

For busy SMEs there is nothing more frustrating than engaging an implementation team who need to be “educated” in their legal processes. How we approach this at ShareDo is to have legal technology experts who specialise in different practice areas, together with out-of-the-box process maps, to support them every step of the way. We work closely with teams to ensure we apply the right solution for their exacting needs and objectives.

2. Incremental updates

Where possible, make the first implementation a ‘true’ Minimal Viable Product (MVP) and then prove that you can deliver incremental change at pace. By executing smaller incremental updates, you are less likely to lose traction with your project schedule and undermine any promises your stakeholders have made to external parties.

3. Ownership

Ensure you appoint a single empowered Product Owner who can manage disparate stakeholders and take a strategic view, as well as a “Project” view. By doing this, you ensure that the work type can scale effectively across all client groups.

3. Choose the right work style for your practice

Case management systems by specialists like ShareDo are ultimately designed to deliver process improvements through differing levels of automation. This ranges from something as as simple as automating precedents or as sophisticated as ‘straight through processing’ that requires no manual intervention whatsoever.

One of the key factors for a successful implementation is getting the level of automation just right for an individual practice group. Too much automation or workflow, when it’s not required by a practice area, will only frustrate and alienate users. Too little automation for more volume-driven practice groups and you’ll get the same outcome!

At ShareDo, we’ve guided our clients to success by automating appropriately for their preferred ‘work style’. We recognise that different user and practice groups require different levels of automation, so adapting the systems to these specific needs can super-charge the overall results you gain.

4. Accelerate adoption by incorporating best practice

Ultimately, this is about incorporating what’s worked well in the past and avoiding reinventing the wheel. All too often, transformation projects assume that everything must go through the transformation mill.

The majority of processes adopted across most law firms for a given Practice Group are very similar. Firms all follow similar processes for Litigation, Real Estate, Commercial and the like. This presents the opportunity to accelerate the delivery of these ‘core workflow’ spines by reusing common process, enabling you to focus on the truly value-added processes and differentiate your service with your clients.

At ShareDo, we deliver this common experience in the form of Solution Accelerators.

Each accelerator contains both a business analysis toolkit (including processing models and supporting documents) together with out of the box solution configuration (work types, workflows and personas). Solution Accelerators enable you to engage more quickly in workshops together with configuration artifacts that enable you to implement quicker. By doing this, your implementations are not ‘reinventing the wheel’, but instead are iterating quickly against a best practice baseline.

5. Create a structured implementation process

The adoption of the Agile project management methodology by the entire software industry has led, in our opinion, to important established best practice often being left behind. Agile doesn’t mean no documentation or no upfront design. Instead, it advocates an appropriate level of these vital tools.

In addition, ‘low code’ platforms often encourage a constant state of ‘tinkering’ with system configuration. These can prove harmful, with implementations lacking strategic direction and taking too long to stabilise.

As part of any CMS implementation, we recommend investing in a considerable upfront design phase. Sharedo describe this as the ‘definition phase’, which includes:

  • Process mapping of workflows – these facilitate conversation with stakeholders and forces the thought process to ensure workflows are workable and gives clear, testable outputs for completed workflow.
  • High level design document – describing the overall scope of the initiative, this bible is laser-focused on what an MVP should be and ensures strong stakeholder buy-in to the end solution.

6. Build an agile, multi-disciplinary team

You will require a variety of disciplines to successfully implement a CMS or Legal Operational Management system. Our clients enjoy the greatest level of success when the following roles are fully involved in the process.

  • Change Champion or Business Partner – the Change Champion is actively working with Practice Groups to build business cases for incremental process improvement and manage these improvements into the business. This role could be part of a wider Six Sigma style initiate.
  • Lead Configurator / Business Analyst – solutions such as ShareDo are designed to enable Business Analysts to quickly translate requirements into working solutions. The ideal person here can not only “speak the legal language” of a particular practice group, but can also translate and configure as well. Within our organisation we see this as the most critical role on the project. This individual tends to be the most experienced people in the team.
  • Document Automation Specialists – most, if not all, legal process improvement initiatives will involve significant levels of document automation. Getting automation right is essential and should not be overlooked as a dedicated role.

While the above roles are considered as the ‘core three’ on any winning implementation, larger initiatives will add further dedicated roles into the mix.

  • Workflow Developers – in a similar way to Document Automation, where there is significant demand for workflow automation across the firm, we recommend this becomes a specialist role. This frees up the Business Analysts to focus on mapping process, while enabling the Workflow Developer to focus on creating reusable and consistent workflows.
  • Quality Assurance – across most of our initiatives we see the quality role being fulfilled by the above core team. However, for large initiatives there are significant benefits to specialising this role. Not only does it allow you to cover the more scale but comes with the added benefit of not ‘marking your own homework’.

7. Craft the right data migration strategy

Due to the maturity of today’s CMS market, you will more likely be replacing a legacy solution than moving to a new platform for the first time. As such, you’ll need to give considerable thought to your data migration strategy and the ‘cost benefit versus change’ trade-off. We have identified three migration strategies, each of which have their own benefits and challenges.

Run off files from previous system or don’t migrate any data

If you decide not migrate data, but instead run-off files on your old CMS, then we urge you to consider restructuring your operational teams around the newly created files. When a new system goes live, there is always a period of adjustment as people get used to it, during which time productivity often declines for a short period before accelerating and realising benefits. This period is critical in the change lifecycle and is often referred to as the “trough of despair”. During this period, should you decide not to migrate any legacy data, your people will be using two systems – one of which they are expected to learn. This will undoubtedly impact productivity and the effectiveness of change. To this end, we recommend restructuring your operational teams.

Migrate all case data

The seamless transfer of data between systems on ‘day one’ is by far the most acceptable solution for your end users but comes at considerable cost. There will most like be no easy mapping between the data of your new and old system and considerable effort will have to be channelled to achieve a like-for-like transfer. This effort needs to be carefully weighed up against the change benefits.

Migrate core case data and add the rest as unstructured

A common cost/benefit trade-off to address the complexity of migrating all case data is to only migrate the data required for day one processing, e.g. case status and milestones information. The remaining information, such as file notes or comments, can be migrated as a follow-up stage. We recommend that administrative support is provided to necessitate your case handlers “setting up” each file when they arrive to this task.

Conclusion

We’re not going to fabricate reality and say that implementing case management systems is easy. Step changes that can truly transform your business for the long-term take time and effort to get right. Like any other core operational system, your new CMS will touch the majority of processes in your firm and, if done correctly, will be the catalyst to re-energise and propel your performance to the next level.

However, with this impact comes a significant amount of change. Change that needs to be managed carefully.

Our Professional Services team’s day job is implementing Case and Matter Management Systems for Enterprise Legal Service Providers. They’re a friendly and smart bunch, so if you need some advice or even a “virtual” cup of tea then feel free to reach out!

Empowering legal professionals through technology and process support

sharedo on January 24, 2022

The challenge

Your brightest professionals will be passionate about their chosen careers but will often wear many hats out of necessity and end up handling tasks that don’t require a legal degree or the experience gained over years of practicing law. These “distractions” will at best diminish their billable hours or client relationship building but will at worst diminish their love for the firm. For these reasons empowering legal professionals should be at the heart of our legal operations mindset.

To understand how we might best empower our fee earners we need to focus in on 3 elements:

Non-value activities

  1. Using the data from ShareDo, methodologies such as Lean Six Sigma can be applied to determine the value and non-value add activities that are being performed in the system.
  2. Identifying non-value adding activities, those that clients are unwilling to pay for directly or indirectly, and eliminating them either via process change or automation can significantly improve the value that clients receive and your ability to competitively provide quality service to your clients.

Utilising specialist skills set

  1. Legal professionals are hired primarily for their expert knowledge, creativity, ability to build client relationships and the ability to draw expert based opinions from limited information.
  2. Their legal training and experience allows them to perform skilled tasks such as identifying points of weakness in an opposition, identify technical challenges in contracts and negotiating settlements.
  3. Identifying tasks that take them away from these core functions is critical in implementing the efficient and effective legal operations required to bring client value and succeed in a highly competitive market.

Rework

  1. Using data captured around when activities are performed correctly the first time can allow identification of sticking points in the process and reduce the overhead on legal professionals by applying corrective measures to those processes or practices that are causing them additional work.

Our challenge then is to design our services to maximise the “lawyering” that are legal professionals are able to do and provide appropriate support to ensure that non legal activities are delivered to the same high quality standards.

Since ShareDo has been designed for the single purpose of making legal process more efficient it contains 100s of rich features to make your legal professionals life easier!

12 quick processes to automate that will make your lawyers happy

1. Go Paperless and share files seamlessly

Electronic files are a faster and easier mechanism for providing legal services than traditional paper. Documents can be searched for, shared and collaborated on in real time and can be securely accessed from anywhere using cloud based technologies such as ShareDo.

  1. Seamlessly store documents to your document repository tool
  2. Use Sharedo virtual data rooms to securely share and collaborate on documents
  3. Use workflow to trigger actions based on the upload of documents
  4. Initial automated chase processes for documents that have missed their deadline

2. Delegate work

The ShareDo delegation functionality allows you to delegate a task or part of a task to another user whilst keeping accountability and ownership of the task. This allows fee earners to hand off tasks to colleagues with different skill sets without losing sight of progress or visibility of the outcome.

3. Disaggregation

Use ShareDo’s work disaggregation capability to make sure your legal professionals receive the right tasks at the right time and ensure legal professionals are working on the activities where they add the most value to your clients.

  1. Use ShareDo competencies to define the skills of your users and teams
  2. Smart allocation rules use the context and complexity of the work to determine who the most appropriate resources is and make sure your legal professionals are receiving skill appropriate work.
  3. Round robin and ‘busyness’ capabilities allow you to allocate tasks based on resource workload as well as capability
  4. Set up centralised teams to deal with common processes allowing standardisation and the ability for the legal teams to focus on applying their valuable expertise to legal activities and client relationships
  5. Allow senior legal professionals to reduce risk and to mentor and guide their colleagues using complexity based approval processes

4. Automate your precedents using smart content

ShareDo’s rich document automation functionality allows legal professionals to focus on the parts of precedents that require their legal acumen rather than focusing on standard clauses or, more frustratingly, the formatting of a document.

Author
Author pre-defined precedents using our integrated word app downloaded from the Microsoft App Store.

Automatically vary content
ShareDo precedents pull in data from your matter and use smart content to hide and show content based on work type, complexity or other factors.

Write it once
Smart content and content blocks can be used to significantly reduce the operational overhead of maintaining a large volume of precedents

Clause bank
Fee earners or document authors can create or maintain predefined legal clauses or text

Integrate into your existing infrastructure
Take advantage of our O365, DocuSign, iManage and sharepoint integration to seamlessly integrate your fee earners experience of generating, storing and sharing documents

5. Implement smart working with smart plan workflow

Legal professionals can take advantage of our powerful smart plan technology to automate areas of the legal process that are repeatable or require additional oversight. Where processes can’t be fully automated our dynamic workflow engine can assess the type and complexity of work and provide tasks, activities and checklists that allows users to execute their workload in the most efficient way.

For every activity that is produced in the system helpful calls to action are added to present the user with the right piece of the application in which to perform the action. Documents and emails can be automated including chasers for information or documents required from the client or third parties.

6. Implement shared service centres

Many legal professions find themselves spending time on tasks that are often administrative and common across multiple work types. Typical examples of this are the matter inception process, conflict or AML checks, inbound post.

Implementing a shared service centre using ShareDo is an excellent way to centralise common processes and provide relief for your fee earners from these non-legal tasks whilst providing them with up to date information about progress.

ShareDo also provides the infrastructure and security to share workload with outsourcing providers, allowing you to further allow your fee earners to focus on their core skillsets and to make use of lower cost resource.

7. Time recording

Keeping track of your billable and non-billable hours can be challenging. ShareDo offers sophisticated time recording functionality that enables fee earners to log time with little or no effort.

Delight your legal professionals by taking away from them the burden of time recording and allow ShareDo to automatically stop and start timers or automatically logging time when they are completing certain tasks.

8. E-signature

Use our e-signature capability to speed up the ability to get final documents signed off. Integration with DocuSign allows fee earners to share documents with clients and third parties and receive signatures online.

9. Client Self Service

Whilst building and maintaining client relationships is one of the key skills of any legal professional many clients want to be able to proactively track and monitor the progress of a case.

ShareDo’s external portals allow the fee earners to provide the clients with their own dashboard on which to track cases. Different business areas can choose to securely show as little or as much information as they like to clients. External views can provide sophisticated management information to B2B clients whereas consumers can see a simple, intuitive version of external portals.

Portals can be configured to allow clients or third parties to upload documents, provide approvals and even action their own tasks. Empowering the client in this way not only brings value to them but allows the fee earner to reduce the amount of ‘are we nearly there yet’ conversations by keeping the client in the loop at all times.

10. Client Reporting

Reporting to you clients should be a simple task however we have all seen legal professionals spending significant portions of time on extracting or manipulating data to provide custom client reports.

Implementing ShareDo gives your fee earners the freedom to capture the specific data points required for client reporting without requiring the overhead of creating specific work types or processes. Clients can either self-serve via the external portals or reports can be produced from our powerful data warehouse capability. The modern API structure of the system also allows data to be pushed or pulled through into client systems to allow your process to be fully integrated with theirs.

11. Work Management

Using our work management tools and screens allows legal professionals to quickly gain an oversight of the progress of work on a specific matter or to gain a holistic view across their teams work portfolio.

Our out of the box reports can be used to view the workload of different team members and to drill down into the detail of individual tasks or cases. Work is prioritised by due date enabling team members to understand when tasks need to be completed and to ensure that client SLA’s are met.

12. Collaboration

Use the many collaboration tools in ShareDo to allow your lawyers teams to seamlessly work together. This is just a sample of some of the ways you can collaborate using ShareDo.

Shared view of work
A secure shared view of work and matter portfolios allows teams, departments and individuals to share and re-allocate work

@Mentions
Use social media style mentions to notify colleagues of changes or comments on a file – choose to receive in app or email notifications

Milestone visibility
Use key dates to share key milestones on your matter amongst colleagues and use our configurable plan views to share these

Collaborate
Collaboratively work on documents for your case either internally with colleagues or externally with clients or third parties

Share Knowledge
Use a matter wiki to build up a collaborative view on the matter

Share the story
ShareDo’s powerful chronology features allows you to share the story of the matter amongst colleagues and clients. Giving you the ability to filter or sort the narrative based on points of interest, time or people.

Wotton & Kearney go-live with ShareDo

sharedo on October 13, 2021

16th September 2021,

ShareDo announced that Wotton + Kearney went live with the first phase of their firm-wide rollout of ShareDo case management.

Using automated workflows, business insights and AI, Wotton & Kearney are seeking to achieve better claims cycle times, client outcomes and insights; together with improving their SLA management and reporting. In addition, ShareDo will speed up their journey to being ‘Paperlite’ and help them provide better legal services in this new insurtech era.

Rolling out office by office across Australia the solution will be used by ~400 people across matter types including commercial litigation, recoveries, cyber and personal injury.

Product Manager for ShareDo, Ben Nicholson, states
“It’s been fantastic working alongside such as forward looking firm as Wotton + Kearney and tremendous to see this milestone being achieved; a testimony to a lot of peoples hard efforts and dedication.”

About ShareDo

ShareDo is a legal case management platform that enables lawyers to achieve superhuman results. It creates more time by making light work of countless daily tasks, leaving you laser-focused on delivering the best outcomes for your clients.

Built using the best technology stack to solve today’s business problems, ShareDo improves law firm’s productivity and efficiency to help drive successful client outcomes.

Today, ShareDo is the fastest growing CMS in the UK, experiencing continuous year-on-year growth as more and more law firms are switching to its disruptive technology platform.

Learn more about us at sharedo.co.uk

What will case management software look like in the year 2030?

sharedo on April 20, 2021

Introduction

The average lifespan of a case management system is 10 years.

This article explores some of the themes that are either emerging now or are likely to emerge over the next 5-10 years and takes a brief look at what a Case and Matter management system might look like in 10 years’ time.

10 years carries significance for a couple of reasons:

Agricultural Age: 4000 – 1700 AD

Industrial Age: 1700 AD – 1960 AD

Information Age: 1960 AD – 2030 AD

Knowledge Age: 2030 AD – ???

Firstly it’s the end of what a lot of people call the information age and the start of the next age which is called a variety of things such as Knowledge, Reckoning or the like.

Learning CMS Systems

Workflow by Example

So the CMS of 2030 will I believe address one of my personal pet hates; the process of converting process maps into workflow systems.

Like many business analysts I’ve spent a good chunk of my career analysing a mountain of process maps… and then spent another good chunk of my career converting them into workflow models.

Now there are a number of problems to this approach

  1. Firstly it takes a lot of time … things get lost in translation .. processes change in the time it takes us to implement them
  2.  Secondly people don’t fundamentally follow process charts

Our CMS of 2030 will learn these by observation and suggest the optimum “standardised processes”. This in turn will significantly reduce the effort that is required to implement these sort of processes. Likewise by designing more and more processes around adaptive case management methods users will be given more and more freedom to quickly step outside of the process.

Data Driven Decisions

So whilst solving the workflow problem is a reasonable sized problem to address the same techniques will also be applied to other similar questions. And hence the CMS of 2030 will enable us to quickly answer questions such as:

  • “How long will this case take?”
  • “How much will this case cost?”

The net result is that we will be more accurate in the management of ad-hoc work and much of the “routine” will be implemented from case processes.

Addressing information overload

Both in our day to day life and our business life we are bombarded by information… and everyone’s information is always more important than others!

A case or matter management system is no different and users can quickly be overloaded by “noise”. They become desensitised to it and the information becomes worthless.

Today we allow user to change the frequency of these notifications. So for example they can “turn down the noise” to only receive approval notifications once a week.

But the CMS of 2030 will solve these problems, understand the concept of “pertinent information” and hence the information we receive will become meaningful rather than noise to be ignored.

[Editor note: whilst this is a conceptually easy problem to understand its significantly harder to solve!]

Designing for People and Machines

Case Management systems collect a huge amount of complex structured and structured information .. Information that through its sheer volumes can again become “overloaded”.

So we’re pretty proud of our Case Management UX at Sharedo – its designed for people to complete ad-hoc workflows as they go through their journeys (we call these “blades”).

That said from a product perspective we consider ourselves part way through the journey from a traditional GUI to what is termed a NUI or Natural User Interface.

However I’m equally certain that the UX of the CMS of 2030 is going to change significantly even from where ShareDo is today. Analysts talk about the next evolution beyond NUI as being Organic User Interfaces … personally I’m slightly cynical as to whether the bulk of case handlers will be wearing VR headsets and manipulating files in a 3 dimensional space in 10 years but I could well be wrong.

That said I do think what we will start seeing is the integration of chat bots together with almost a retro “command line interface” into case systems.

We’re starting to experiment with similar styles of interaction to that seen in applications like slack.

In this world the primary case view would be your case history and from there you will be able to perform any action quickly.

This is an interface that we will gradually start to see evolving into a more natural language style of UX.

As the desire to automate more and more activities progresses so will the need increased need for case systems to also be designed to be machine centric.

In common with most modern case and matter management applications we design ShareDo API First.

API First essentially means two things:

  1. We start by designing the API by which data and behaviour can be consumed.
  2. And then layer on any required user interface components

What this means in practice is that every single interaction that can be completed through the UI can also be completed via a machine to machine call; whether that is configuring a document or entering matter data.

That said I think the case systems of the future need to be more sophisticated than this however and will be able to support dynamic supply chains where different elements of the case lifecycle are provided by a different organisation.

Saying goodbye to valueless data entry

I think we have all done a reasonable large amount of valueless data entry in our careers to date.… and as someone who has spent a considerable time designing complex data entry forms I am only too aware of:

  • how much of this data is duplicated
  • how little the majority of users care about this “gold”
  • … and hence how the existing model for data entry is currently far from optimal

So whilst we move towards more machine to machine CMS integration much of this effort will be eased, the CMS of 2030 will be significantly more sophisticated in the way in which it extracts data from textual documents using sentiment style analysis. For example we will take information from the likes of medical reports and turn these into structured data more easily.

Today we are broadly solving these challenges using:

  • Brute force algorithms that require a huge amount of time and data to train
  • Or by throwing cheap resource at the problem
  • Or indeed deploying an army of python developers etc

The CMS of 2030 will be deploying entirely more sophisticated algorithms at this problem set and hence reduce “valueless data entry”

Automating the activity not the role

As we squeeze the last few drops out of big data and lean six sigma…we will be automating the activity (but not the role!)

So over the course of the next 10 years we will be gradually be removing friction and non value added activities from human involvement with our CMS.

There is a quote from someone at the London Business school that describes this process as, and I paraphrase, as “… squeezing the last drops of juice from the oranges that are Lean Six Sigma and Big Data.”

And hence for many processes using our CMS of 2030 our job will be to manage transactions by exception.

But for the majority of processes; using the CMS of 2030 will make I believe the working life of our users a much more positive thing. With the CMS removing much of the “mundane” we can focus on being more human which has to be a good thing.

Dev Blog Update – Q2 2021

sharedo on March 28, 2021

Release 6.35 is available now

It’s been a busy few months for the growing ShareDo product team with release 6.35 bringing us a raft of new features.

Modeller

  1. New Key Facts Widget – enabling WYSIWYG editing of dynamic content for portals
  2. Configure Chronology POI’s – you can now configure your own custom points of interest
  3. Portals now support master pages together with targeting multiple personas

Core Case

  1. Virtual Data Rooms – we have release our new VDR functionality as the most secure mechanism for sharing files with external parties. More info below.

User Management

  1. User Types – we have simplified the onboarding of users with more configurable user types
  2. Convert Person to a User – streamlining the process of onboarding portal users
  3. SCIM – We have added support for the SCIM 2.0 protocol enabling you to easily provision users from identity services such as Active Directory

Document Assembly

  1. There is a new document administration portal containing all document related functionality in a single focused experience
  2. Configuration of document templates has been simplified together with offering more advanced configuration features for template targeting and output storage
  3. We have introduced a new email template editor together with an optimised end user experience
These features are described briefly in the following sections. As always for more details please see the relevant help materials or contact customer success.

Virtual Data Rooms

ShareDo supports a number of different document sharing patterns with external parties including configurable document repositories or integration with tools such as iManage share. Virtual Data Rooms (VDRs) provide an additional mechanism that:

  1. Is secure by design – following the principle of least privilege
  2. Allows end users to create unlimited VDR’s with any case participants
  3. Can be managed as a separate entity within the system or else can be integrated with existing Matter or other work type portals.
  4. Upon upgrading to R6.36 you will see now find a dedicated work type for Virtual Data Rooms. Together with some example smartplans for the automatic provisioning of these for different circumstances.

Within our reference implementation we have configured VDRs as follows:

  1. When a client case handler is added to a matter/case a VDR is automatically provisioned with the correct permissions and parties
  2. Within the case handlers persona view the new VDR widget is configured to show rooms alongside your standard DMS repository.
  3. Case Handlers can then drag and drop documents directly to the VDR

From an external participants perspective

  1. They are notified when a new document is added to the VDR
  2. Depending upon your configuration requirements external parties can either access their VDR’s as part of the overall Case or Matter
  1. Or via a dedicated VDR portal.

Configuring Virtual Dataroom’s for the first time within your solution takes 1-2 days; as always please contact customer success for a better understanding of how best to configure these or to access our reference implementation.

User Impersonation

As we increase the sophistication of our external digital collaboration journeys; so we must increase the level of testing and verification that we apply to these. To assist in this process we have introduced user impersonation. If you are granted explicit permissions within the security module you are then given the ability to impersonate a given user.
Naturally this feature should be used with extreme care and is locked down by default. Alongside its use for testing external collaboration journeys our clients support teams are also using it to quickly understand users issues and provide support.

Configurable Chronology Points of Interest

Within the ShareDo modeller Chronology feature you will see an expanded set of options for Point of Interest (POI) configuration enabling you to:

  1. Configure all chronology POI
  2. Disable handlers
  3. Create private chronology POI so that some POI can be hidden from external parties (if the Chronology widget is present on their portals)
  4. Derive your own POI handlers enabling you to express Business Audit entries in your own language.

Manage User Types

ShareDo supports a highly configurable security and personalisation schemas for different user types. For a given user you can specify:

  1. Their security Access Control Lists
  2. Their persona (and hence associated portal views)
  3. Their identity provider (with different user types potentially having different identity providers)

Whilst these can all be managed independently all of these settings can now be applied via user types.

Within the Sharedo modeller there is a new entry for “Manage User Types” enabling you to define these.

Streamlining of User Onboarding

In conjunction with the user types enhancements we have also made the journey to convert a person into a user more streamlined. The business scenario where this becomes relevant is on matters where you have collected a third parties details and then wish to make them a portal user.

Subject to the new global permission of “ODS – People – Convert to User” a number action will appear on the participants menu.

Please note the actual provisioning of the user is controlled by a smartplan; this will most likely need to be adjusted for your specific identity management solution. For example if you manage identities in Active directory then you will need this workflow to create the user account within that system.

SCIM Support

SCIM stands for the System for Cross-domain Identity Management (see http://www.simplecloud.info/) with Sharedo now supporting the SCIM 2.0 protocol. This enables you to configure user provisioning and identity synchronisation with identity management applications such as Azure Active Directory.

SCIM configuration is performed under the SCIM Feature within the feature framework

Once configured the relevant SCIM API end points are available for you to use as part of your configuration of Identity Synchronisation as part of Azure Active director for example.

New Key Facts Widget

Within the Portal Modeller you will now find a new key facts widget. This widget provides a WYSIWYG design canvass for creating custom Data Composer driven portal widgets.

Document Admin Portal

In this release we have moved all document template related functionality out of the main Admin portal into its own dedicated portal. For clients that are using the default navigation configuration this will then be available within the launchpad menu for user with the new Admin – Document Assembly permission.

The new Portal is designed to assist clients who have a very large number of document templates in managing these; with all list views being configurable.

In this release there has been some significant reworking of the document template creation process. Most notably we have introduced the concept of Document Template types.

As part of this change you will also notice we have introduced a number of new template types for the production of emails and SMS’s based on the HTML Generator. The previous Email (markdown variations) and SMS template types have been renamed and marked as inactive. The default for Email and SMS are the based on the new rich text editor variation and use new document generators – HTML and HTML to Plaintext respectively.

Note: Unless the old template types are made active again, you can only create HTML templates for Email and SMS that edited within ShareDo.

As well as simplifying the Document Template screens we have also made a number of functional enhancements including:

  • Ability to specify browse and specify dynamic tags for document titles, filenames and storage locations:
  • Ability to specify tags as part of the storage of the document
  • Ability to specify display rules to enable dynamic display of templates for specific case types or phases.

New Email Template Editor

As mentioned above by default the older style of email templates using markdown will be made inactive by default although should you so wish you can still create emails of this type. Instead email templates are now authored using the in built ShareDo editor
  1. WYSIWYG editing of templates
  2. Full support for data composer tags including standard, image and link tags
  3. Repeating Sections
  4. Conditional Section

Email End User Experience

In this release there have been a number of enhancements to the end user experience for authoring emails including:

  • Hiding of secondary actions such as BCC, Receipts behind a separate menu
  • Subject and Body have been updated to use the new rich text editor component

Portal Editor – Target Multiple Personas

You are now able to target a portal definition at multiple personas.
When a portal is requested ShareDo scans the type hierarchy entirely first looking for a portal definition (either from modeller, or from manifest) that matches this type + persona. If it can’t find a persona one, then it scans again looking for non-persona versions. This means you can define a client portal at the “matter” level and because persona is now the first criteria, it will return say “core.matter.client” instead of “core.matter-some-specific-type-no-persona”.

Portal Editor – Master Page Support

For a given portal you are now able to specify a master page containing various widgets that will then be used across all portal pages.
A common use of this is to place common widgets such as page titles and the like within the master page in order to simplify your portal definitions.

Portal – Theme Enhancements

As we see more and more clients implementing multiple brands and cobranded portals within ShareDo we have added additional configuration support for

  1. Configuration of Favicon
  2. Specification of a different primary colour to be used on dark backgrounds in order to maintain your accessibility contrast ratios

List View Enhancements

Additional configuration options have been been added to list views including

  1. Ability to show related key dates as columns
  2. Ability to filter by custom attributes

Configurable Blade Save Behaviour

You can now configure whether blades will save automatically or not upon first creation. This is configured through the override operations feature on a work type.

Wiki Enhanced Support for Large Images

There has tremendous uptake in the use of our wiki functionality since it was introduced in V6.24. We have seen clients uploading considerable quantities of content within their work items including lots of very large images. Since large images can begin to limit page performance we have introduced 2 new features to assist in managing this.

Within the Rich Text Editor global feature configuration you can now specify the maximum size for images uploaded.

If a user inserts an image over this size they are directed to resize the image; alternatively this action can be kicked off manually if required.

Performance Enhancements

There have been a number of performance enhancements made across the application most notably in 3 areas

  1. Rendering of blades using complex aspect striping rules is considerably faster
  2. An initial set of performance improvements have been made to the import export tool although there are more of these to come in subsequent releases
  3. We have removed out reliance on SQL Server materialised views which is showing a ~ 20% performance improvement in certain areas of the application. Note: The impact of this change should only be noticeable to on-premise clients.

Security Enhancements

Following our latest round of pentesting 24 low and medium severity issues have been addressed. Further details are available on request.

Major Bug Enhancements

[84319]-Matter (Dispute) – Changing fee structure template throws a non-stop progress wheel

[84320]-Budget Breakdown not resetting after exceeding fee structure

[86043]-Fee Breakdown – Changing time period doesn’t refresh/clear previous time period data entered

[88899]-Matter dispute (claimant’s vehicle participant / registration) – The required field warning message is not hidden after entering a valid registration number

[89562]-Goods and Service – Rate Card Type hides code

[89731]-Option Set Striping: Court Type list on Proceedings does not honour jurisdiction matching rules for striping – escalated by WK needs to be in 6.25

[89756]-Modeller: Portal Designer – need to be able to see where portal is inherited from

[89779]-[Phase Guard 2] No audit event for data quality

[90430]-[Search Scopes] Admin Screens should have Save, Close and save and close buttons

[90960]-[Modeller] Work Type: Change Rules – Participant warning/error and process not working

[90983]-Change work type (children to change to each other in a specific phase) – The ‘change type’ option is not responsive

[90998]-Version Number: Not always pulling through to client environments

[91001]-Matching Rules: Option set endpoint bringing back inactive items

[91187]-[Drafting Widget] Its Ugly + Doesn’t show full details + Invalid Date

[91368]-ShareDo Role Permissions: Cannot be switched off once a vary by phase has been set

[91399]-Error when opening the Prep Doc blade

[91414]-Reporting – Permissions Report not available

[91439]-Formbuilder: Unable to progress matter if non visible mandatory field not set

[91494]-Modeller (work type / participant roles list) – The active column displays an active value for a roles, but the role is inactive

[91601]-Dispute matter (edit liability/chronology): Display issue with a long text

[92148]-New b2b instruction (Defendant General Claim) – An error of ‘Unable to resolve an approval model’ and a non-stop progress wheel are thrown when submitting a new instruction

[92284]-[Goods and Service] Manage goods and services cannot filter on item name

[92314]-Work Type still displaying when turned off in config

[92441]-[Admin] Feature: Competencies – Renaming Competency Type the name doesn’t persist

[92479]-[Modeller] Option Set – Striping: Error if adding Display Rule before list values are saved

[92514]-[Rich Text Editor] Table editing isn’t great

[92521]-Dispute Matter (Liability widget) – The liability positions are not displayed

[92668]-Emails can be sent unparented

[92905]-Formbuilder Document Questionnaire name in document file name – railed to tokenise error message

[92911]-[Multi Party Docs][4633]Questionnaire participant pickers do not work on a multi party document

[92957]-[4520][Email from Action Plan] When creating an email from a call to action

[92970]-[PI Valuation] PI Valuation guidance should not have a total

[93289]-Timezone Aspect breaks the instruction blade

[93339]-Documents admin (Document Templates list) – The ‘Applies to’ column is missing

[93351]- Offer details aspect sub type does not honour striping

[93352]-Limited view of Email Templates

[93394]-Some email scroll bars do not work when accessed through the chronology

[93421]-Appointment – timezone is required, however you should already know this based on the Jurisdiction of the matter

[93457]-Legacy tags are no longer working in email templates

[93471]-Appointment Sub Type – not picking up items in hierarchical list

[93487]-Matter (notification email task) – A non-stop progress wheel is thrown when trying to open the associated blade

[93510]-New Key Dates Widget doesn’t convert date to time zone

[93542]-Incident Start Date appearing twice when key date not set to allow multiples

[93645]-Key Dates duplicating – Dates on key dates changing by one day

[94387]-[Offers] Aspect Configuration – Not possible to configure the offer rationale’s label

[94396]-Attaching related doc does not unlock the UI

[94511]-Html Generation – html encoding of data-if attributes was not being handled correctly

[94523]-Phase change comments – should be plain text and remove 250 character limitation

[94525]-Appointment’s default end date is not displayed as blank although the ‘default end date’ flag has been set to false

[94598]-Email Document Delivery – valid files for bundling guard doesn’t work when repository provider is iManage

[94615]-Form Builder Optionset Picker validation firing when field is non mandatory

[94626]-Matter (Documents) – Bundle generation fails – PDF conversion failed error

[94627]-[Document Bundling] – can’t add tag libraries to document separator templates

[94629]-[Document Bundling] – Document Bundle should only show bundle separator templates in the dropdowns

[94652]-Bundle Generation – unable to use context data composer tags in document separator templates

[94653]-AddEditShareDo blade is leaking event subscriptions.

[94673]-[Document] Prepare email not working on matter key facts blade

[94801]-Matter (participant) – Add new location does not display the find address widget

[94836]-Document admin (document templates / email templates) – A 400 or an insert related error is thrown with a non-stop progress wheel if the config is not reloaded/refreshed after a template change

[94845]-Email Arching needs a few more settings and a patch to HCPC’s version

Clinical Negligence Cases – The Democratisation of Data Analytics for Effective Decision Making

sharedo on February 20, 2021

The challenge

Each year the NHS receives more than 10,000 new claims for compensation. Current estimates, obtained from a recent Freedom of Information Request by the BBC, put the total costs of outstanding claims at £83bn, with associated legal fees estimated to be in the region of £4.3bn. This trend of increasing claim numbers and higher value settlements is putting more pressure on the NHS budget. In fact, the cost of outstanding claims equates to over 65% of NHS England’s total budget for 2018-19.

In today’s climate of socio-economic disruptions and high demand for NHS services, the pressure on public services to perform under heavy budget cuts is ultimately putting a huge strain on the NHS.

alls for Reform

The current system of clinical negligence claims has been heavily criticised by many as complex, inequitable, protracted and expensive, with a general lack of clarity regarding the difference between gross medical negligence and ordinary human error in medical practice. In addition to calls for justice reform, the Department of Health has pledged to tackle “the unsustainable rise in the cost of clinical negligence” and here at ShareDo, we strongly believe there are significant opportunities to reduce costs, improve efficiencies, and optimise service delivery through the adoption of an intelligent, collaborative work management systems such as ShareDo.

Reducing the Complexity Burden

ShareDo’s primary aim is to reduce the complexity burden through intelligent case management that is all about changing the very fundamentals of how we work effectively; how we visualise work, share it, transport it, track and ultimately integrate it within new frameworks of collaboration. At its core, ShareDo streamlines, automates, and accelerates case processes through rich, secure collaboration spaces, intelligent data capture and information storage, whilst empowering data-driven-decision-making through machine learning and predictive analytics in context.

Democratisation of Data in Decision Making

There has never been a more interesting time with respect to the world of data and its pivotal role in this new world digital economy. Here at ShareDo, we believe that by democratising and leveraging the wealth of digital insights available at your fingertips, ShareDo business analytics makes it’s possible to make more informed decisions that will lead to commercial growth, evolution, and an increased bottom line. The democratisation of data through ShareDo analytics breaks down information silos and enables a new breed of data exploration to evolve, known as data-driven-decision support with predictive analytics, which is concerned with the prediction of future probabilities and trends.  The central element is the predictive model, which can be trained over your data, learning from the complete experience of your organisation within hours.  As a result, legal professionals can now benefit from real-time data-driven-decision making (DDDM), where intuition is supported by empirical evidence, to achieve unbiased, accurate and repeatable outcomes.

Analytics in Context

Data driven decision making (DDDM) is a process that involves collecting data based on measurable KPIs in context, analysing and presenting patterns and facts from these insights, and utilising them to develop strategies and actions that benefit both you and your client.

By delivering analytics in the context of work activities, ShareDo empowers legal professionals, without technical expertise, to analyse and extract insights to inform decisions throughout clinical negligence case journey. Critical insights that can support you and your client to:

PREDICT & FORECAST
Accurate forecasting of timescales, quantum and settlement outcomes
Accurately project compensation fund release through predictive settlements;

ANALYSE & TRACK
Real-time analysis of reserving accuracy, budgets and costs tracking;
Manage and track reserve accuracy through reserve predictions, benchmarking and tracking;
Guard against any unconscious biases with empirical evidence to underpin expertise

IMPACT & ACTIONS
Data-driven decisions with insights that go beyond the dashboard;
Utilise real-time negotiation analytics and know-your-opponent data within the offer process for improved settlements.

It is at this current juncture where business intelligence ceases to be a “technology task” practiced by the few, but seamlessly interwoven into everyday processes and back into the control of the users that understand the data the most.

The Path to Success

It is understood that while data-driven-decision-making through predictive analytics itself is a new and emerging category of software, the business drivers behind it are not, and in order to be successful, law firms will need to move quickly to keep abreast of the changes, reshaping structure, systems, and the method of delivery of legal services.

By embedding data analytics into the central clinical negligence case journey, firms can streamline internal business processes, identify unfolding trends, interpret and monitor emerging risks, and build mechanisms for constant feedback, forecasting and service improvement to their clients. Ultimately, businesses that deliver usable analytical solutions outperform their peers financially by 20% [source Gartner]. Driving analytics into everyday decision support will thereby enable you to gain competitive edge and stay at the forefront of digital disruption.