Herbert Smith Freehills Select ShareDo
Herbert Smith Freehills, one of the world’s leading international law firms has selected ShareDo for a global implementation across a…
MacRoberts Select ShareDo
MacRoberts, a leading Scottish commercial law firm, has selected ShareDo as their strategic case and legal operations management system.
Graham Thoms – MacRoberts’ Chief Information Officer commented:
“MacRoberts is excited to be working with ShareDo, a strategic legal productivity solution for the whole of the MacRoberts Group. ShareDo, a visionary technology platform, will integrate and operate seamlessly with all our systems, enhance our management of GDPR, add firmwide document automation capability, assist with and maintain our ISO data security requirements, add to our firm and matter data management and processes with low code/no-code workflow, enhance client messaging/information delivery with its strong communication and portals capability, all whilst maintaining Group information barriers. We have been looking at Sharedo for some time, seeing its capability develop to a point where it had become compelling and the only viable proposition to replace our ageing workflow system. ShareDo has also been a pleasure to work with and we look forward to the journey ahead with them.”
Sebastian Negreira – Global Head of Sales at ShareDo said:
“It has been a fantastic journey with a forward-thinking law firm, who want to operate dynamically in the market to achieve real value for their clients and consistent growth. We’re excited to support this transition from their legacy systems onto a modern platform that will support the firm’s aspirations.”
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
Zego Insurance Selects ShareDo for claims management
Zego insurance, the first UK insurtech to secure unicorn status, had scoured the market for months, looking for an adaptive claims management system to enable the business to start managing claims internally. However, the Zego team could not find any system currently in the insurance market that would enable them to effectively build their own processes, customer journey and provide the granular level of data they required as an organisation. Looking outside the box, and with knowledge of ShareDo’s experience in legal mass claims and legal insurance claims, they approached our team to show them the ShareDo application. Within a couple of weeks, and through a number of accelerated timed meetings, the Zego team had selected ShareDo as their new claims management system.
With an aggressive timeline the Zego team required the solution to be live in under 6 weeks including integration with existing policy administration systems. Rising to the challenge the combined team were able to launch the FNOL solution on time by the 1st of August. Future phases will rollout claims and supply chain management internationally.
Sebastian Negreira – Global Head of Sales at ShareDo commented:
“This is the quickest implementation of the ShareDo application yet. The feedback and excitement within the Zego team to ShareDo and our team has been amazing, and we are looking forward to helping Zego realise the potential of the application in other parts of their organisation.”
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
Dev Blog Update – June 2022 R7
Release 7 is available now
The last quarter has been focused on stabilisation and housekeeping in preparation for the upcoming major release -R7.
We’ve spent the month closing out the QA on the last few features, working through our defect and change request backlog to decide what’s in and what’s not, and we performed a new independent security test of the platform to ensure we’ve got that covered.
The other area of activity we’ve been focussing on since our last update is our new branding and alongside this, how we can better provide help and guidance to our customers. Many of you will have regular communications with us to ask for advice on configuring sharedo and we want to make this more accessible.
To achieve this, we’ve settled on a new knowledge base tool to help us communicate information on product configuration. In this tool we will publish videos, guides and tutorials on configuring sharedo and crucially, get feedback on this content. We’re well on the way to getting this content out there and will be communicating to you as soon as we have it ready.
That said, we’ve not been completely idle on the feature front, as there were some key ones we wanted to ensure made the R7 cut. The following features have been released as part of the final R7 feature set.
Features Depreciated in R7
We are depreciating the legacy ShareDo Autodoc word plugin as of 1st July 2022. Document template users should now be using the new word plugin which is available on the Office Store.
Features Released in Q2
Visual Workflow Designer
We were holding back on this while we proved out the use cases that could be achieved using our snippets style workflow editor; but now it is here. The ability to design ShareDo workflows on a visual canvas will be shipped with the R7 release. This feature adds a capability that many customers had been asking for, we hope you like it.
This feature is currently tagged as “beta” and whilst we are satisfied that it meets the minimum feature set required for modelling the most common workflow scenarios it is still someway off where we want it to be. In release 7.1 we will be adding additional functionality to this modeller together with aligning the two workflow canvasses in terms of their feature sets.
Work Item Merge
In many use cases, work items can be created under the wrong parent item or created accidentally. Previously the only option was to create new items and delete the items created in error. We heard your feedback that there is often captured data or history that is difficult to re-produce on new items. The work item merge feature handles this, doing what it says it does and merging two work-types before removing one.
Finance Payment Plans
Following the Finance V2 release last quarter, we are have begun the process of rolling out advanced features using the new model. The first of these is Invoice Payment Plans. The Payment Plans feature allows us to define multi-step schedules for collecting payments on an invoice. This includes events that confirm payments made on time, and those that are missed.
Enhanced 360 Degree Connections Configurability
When viewing a given person, organisation or user; or their related participant you will often see the “Connections” nav bar.
This is now configurable enabling your to specify different connection types in different circumstances
Inactivity Tracking
Within the global features you can now configure the concept of Inactivity
For a given work item you can specify:
- For what period of time it should be considered to be inactive
- Whether the concept of inactive should, for example, include the update of child items such as tasks
When a work item, such as a matter is “flagged” as being inactive by the system an event is raised and you can your own custom workflow logic onto this.
Finance Public API
Another addition to the Finance V2 feature set has been made available. The Public API allows organisations to integrate with the financial information being generated and stored by ShareDo. This can be used to maintain and enquire on the status of budgets, invoices or payment plans.
Word Plugin Enhancements
A set of enhancements to the Word Plugin has been delivered this quarter, responding to requests for the support of calculated fields, the ability to insert key dates as a list of items, date and currency formatting and many other user experience enhancements. We’ve also taken the opportunity to align the plugin with our new product branding.
Time Recording
We have extensively reworked the way in which you define the time codes that are captured against a given work item.
Within the Admin interface you will see a new section “Time” through which you can define:
- Time Code Sets – these are the individual sets of codes that can be used for time classifications;
- Time Classifications – these are groupings of time code sets;
- Time Categories – within time categories you define the rules that determine which time classification should be shown for specific case or matter types
We have also taken the opportunity to enhance the UX for time capture together with a refresh of the public API operations, providing the opportunity for enhanced integration with ShareDo Time Recording.
People and Organisations data loaders
We have been expanding the list of Excel / CSV data loaders that we provide. These can be used to bulk upload lists of people or organisations into ShareDo using a template Excel format.
User synchronisation
ShareDo has had a feature for a while to synchronise users with your Azure Active Directory. This is achieved through AAD provisioning users using the SCIM protocol. We enhanced this feature so that it can set a default user type. This can then be used to drive the teams and permissions that users get when they are initially created.
What's coming in early Release 8?
Alongside this release we are also changing our overall release cadence; moving away from the 2 weekly release cycle to one based on feature sets. The first of these feature releases, is scheduled to be available in Autumn 2022. Within this the following features are planned
Documents
- Data Composer – at the completion of the R7.1 release we are aiming to remove any need for legacy tag libraries; together with some performance improvements.
- Document Assembly – Enable Configuration to specify whether locations are required for document templates
- Document Template Admin – We will be introducing a new set of usage reports into the Document Admin portal
- Document Templates – Enable users to favourite their own templates
- Document Templates – enable users to preview a template and its description prior to opening it.
Word Plugin
- Content Blocks – Enable Template and Document Author Content Blocks to be displayed and managed separately
- Content Blocks – Introduce publishing workflow for content blocks
- Document Author – Enable Easy Changing of a tag from the Document Browser
- Document Author – Enable User to record time including stop watches from the Word Plugin
- Template Author – New template author setting to enable the default boundary box setting
Finance
- Budgets – Enable configurators to specify thresholds together with associated alerts
- Time – Automatic recording of internal and time costs to better track case profitability
- Time – New End User Management Views
List Views
- List Views – Ability to configure multiple list views in a single widget and support List View Switching
- List Views – Ability for End Users to Saved Queries
Modeller
- Matching Rules – enhanced support for Business Rules Expressions
- Optionsets – we will be replacing the current “codes” with system names to avoid import/export overwrites in some circumstances
- Portal Modeller – Allow portal widgets to be targeted by work type category
- Scorecards – New Modeller Screens
- Modeller – Enhanced Navigation for Modeler
- Modeller – new Home Page
Core Case
- Participant Picker – we are rewriting this component to address various usability issues and make it more configurable
- Reworking of the Radar widgets into a consistent set based on our list views
- Work Items – Enable easy management of priority and make management by priority a default in all solutions
Admin
- Enhanced Navigation for Admin Portal
- New admin level screen to diagnose and fix permission related issues
Workflow
- Workflow – New toolbox item to facilitate export of data to repositories
- Workflow – Upgrade assistant for legacy smartplans
- Workflow – UX Enhancements and additional toolbox items
- Workflow – Enhanced Versioning of Workflows and handling of in-flight processes version management
Bugs fixed in R7
As you’d expect for a bug focussed quarter, there’s a few of them. We appreciate the context is difficult from just the title, if there is more information on any of the below items then do get in touch.
[97278] Matter (dispute/proceedings) – Excess key date entries can be created on save in the court timetable
[98034] [Allocation Rules] Error thrown when deleting an allocation rule for one example
[98035] [Allocation Rules] Should be sorted by name not system name
[83626] [Approvals Requested] – Blade does not display correct approvals
[98095] [Approvals] – Change of retract connection settings in modeller throws an unhandled error of ‘retraction transition not found’ when viewing the associated invoice
[99029] [Blade UX] Due date lag colour gets “stuck”
[97396] [Budget Phase Modeller] Roll-up segments not required
[97403] [Budget Phase Modeller] Warning required and cannot delete phases
[98195] [Budgets] Order of Categories / Codes is in the opposite order of of what is configured
[98964] [CASE KEY FACTS] – An error of ‘The insert statement conflicted with the foreign key constraint …’ is thrown on save
[98960] [chronology] – An ‘invalid date’ is displayed for the chronology records
[98114] [Comments] Drop down options are limited by the size of the comments field
[98216] [Connections] Organisation name containing ampersand displays incorrectly
[98747] [Data Composer] – Add missing document pack support
[96876] [DMS] Flat DMS Page – The hover-over tooltip does not work although the ‘show file location tooltip’ flag has been set to true
[98211] [Document Generation] Unable to select Participants as a Recipient to a letter
[98090] [Documents] Display Rule doesn’t respect List tags within Repeating Sections
[98931] [Documents] [Tag Browser] Missing address Tags from Selected Recipient
[97786] [Documents] Matter (Prepare document from a deleted template errors
[97610] [EE Plans – Plan Editor] Plan editor freezes and loses all changes
[95472] [EE] Resubmitting and errored plan when the stream is incorrectly configured is not recoverable
[98656] [Emails] Document Questionnaires. Form Builder “Required” flag is ignored by Phase guard
[97539] [Excel Uploads] Should present the user with the ability to download a sample from the blade
[97285] [Finance V2.0 Migration] Throws error when running migration utility
[97763] [Finance] – Matter (invoice list): The invoice amounts are shown as zero
[97433] [Finance] – Matter home page (financial summary and payment summary): The financial figures are not displayed
[99075] [Finance] – Payment Plans – Saving an Invoice Payment throws an error
[98553] [Finance] – Time Codes – The external reference is not updated
[98185] [Finance] [Chart of Accounts] Add segment value should allow you to search on the code and name when entering a parent in
[98183] [Finance] [Chart of Accounts] Segment Code screen not handling “long strings” gracefully
[98616] [Finance] [Import Export] Chart of Accounts import fails due to work type config (same issue with budgets)
[98455] [Finance] Data Composer Support (Budgets transaction amount formatting) – An object reference error is thrown
[95531] [Finance] Fees – Versioning / Check in: Unlinking an attachment throws an error of ‘The DELETE statement conflicted with the REFERENCE constraint “fk_relatedDocumentId’
[98993] [Finance][Fee structure versioning] – It is possible to submit a new version for matter actual fees without completing the check-in requirements
[97609] [Finance][Fee structure versioning] – New Instruction / change template – A ‘container element not found’ causes a non-stop progress wheel to be thrown
[95681] [Finance][Fee structure versioning] – When drag&drop more than one file an error of ‘A connection that was expected to be kept alive was closed by the server’ was thrown
[98905] [Finance][Fee Structure] – Creation of a new version after a change of template throws a non-stop progress wheel
[99040] [Finance][Invoice] – Matter invoices list view does not display the actual amount of an invoice
[98844] [Finance V2] – Enter New Matter Details Action Plan CTA is opening old world Finance menu
[98253] [My cases] – Changing Provider Ownership and Grouping config returns unexpected results
[96292] Chronology Card entry not being created on formbuilder field when chronology card set to true
[97985] [Import/Export] Errors on decision work type (FK_sharedoBulkPhaseTransitionActions_phaseSystemName)
[96448] [Import/Export] Exporting participant role aspects does not include matching rules
[99155] [ImportExport] Importing a work type with a null phase plan throws an error
[98886] [Instruction] – Submission: An error of ‘Invalid phase transition from ‘instruction-b2b-new’ to ‘instruction-b2b-new’.’ is thrown
[97582] [Invoices] Invoice widget is looking at the top level Invoice type config for its participant role config and not at the derived type [97824] [Invoices] List view amount column not showing amounts
[96863] [Invoices] Missing a journey of allocating an existing payment to an invoice from the invoice
[98048] [Legacy Work Type Features] Remove feature “Allows someone with the delegated approver.. “
[98056] [Legacy Work Type Features] Remove the “Allows access to Scorecard and Assessment features for this type”
[98031] [Matching Rules] Non standard matching rules control in use on allocation rules
[97302] [Menu Providers] Missing a command for Change Work Type + needs to be added to “seeded” menus
[97601] [Menus] Recent Items Menu – should be configured as part of the default menus
[98065] [Modeller] – Work type (key dates) – The attribute setting for the ‘prevent future dates’ is not honoured
[94853] [Modeller] Phase Plan Editor – does not check for instance of work items on child items
[96375] [Modeller][Service Portfolio Modeller] Mandatory field indicator does not remain when user completes fields
[98889] [Modeller][Work types] – Offer: Activating the open option throws a 404 contents not found error
[97604] [Multi-Currency] Currency code doesn’t look correct based on config
[97602] [Multi-Currency] Fees not picking up multi currency support
[97753] [Notifications] In settings, checkboxes can be shown under the wrong column heading
[98708] [Offers] – The value of the offer rational is not submitted to the database
[97020] [Page View Analytics] Split Page view out into a separate feature so we can limit display of widgets based on this
[98712] [Participant Role Modeller] – Inconsistent Roles – Unexpected Error message when trying to add multiple roles to a participant (and confusing config)
[96933] [Participants] – On a dispute Matter with multiple Claimants/Defendants the Matter title is ‘1st Claimant alphabetically vs 1st Defendant alphabetically’
[98283] [Party Types] Add quick search link does more than just add a link but stops search as well
[98575] [Payments] “Sequence contains no matching element” (PaymentDataEnricher)
[98605] [Phase Change] Transitioning a sharedo with phase guards/comment does not close blade
[98735] [Public API] – (Finance / POST Invoice) – The invoice amount is not displayed in the invoice blade
[98645] [Public API] – (Financial work types / POST / Invoice) – The transaction description is missing
[98643] [Public API] – (Financial work types / POST Invoice) – The transaction item type validation is case sensitive hence a 406 response is returned
[98644] [Public API] – (Financial work types / POST) – A 500 internal server error is returned – Object reference not set to an instance of an object
[98894] [Public API] (Finance / Invoice / Post) – The chronology records display an ‘Error in POI handler’ … invalid widget [NULL]
[98568] [Public API] (Time / POST method) – The returned Id cannot be found in the database, despite the new record gets created
[98550] [Public API] (Time / PUT method) – A response state of 200 is returned for a non-existing Id
[98552] [Public API] (Time / PUT method) – The external reference is not updated
[99004] [Public API] Team ownership query in work item search API doesn’t work
[98642] [Public API] Work item search should always respect AncestorIds config
[98902] [Public API][Organisation / GET] – The Get Method does not retrieve the bank details in the body of its response
[98842] [Public APIs] – chartOfAccountsCodeId is missing an ‘s’ at the end in Account Adjustments JSON
[98653] [Rich Text Editor] – Matter (Wiki) – The list of styles need a vertical scroll-bar
[98707] [Rich text editor] – Some of the styling options are not displayed within their container
[98849] [SMS] [Notifications] Mentions notification sent out via SMS contains HTML
[96194] [User Profile] Location Nav throws error when permission not present
[97294] [User Types] User Types cannot be deleted
[99074] [Visual Workflow] – Error on collection within for block in separate step
[98648] [Wiki Widget] – Identifier should be mandatory
[98714] [Documents]{Urgent] Participants selected from Doc Questionnaire return empty lines when using a Calculated Field to return a list.
[97954] Display Rule using Doc Questionnaire Participant Picker doesn’t work
[98180] Document Generating. Save and Close causes Document Questionnaires to be replicated.
[93883] Participant Locations: DX fields cleared down when an address lookup search is undertaken
[98598] Phase guard for delivery channels – wording isn’t clear to end users [98214] Syntax Error on Email Generation when using HTML Content Blocks
[96234] User unable to see the call to action for an email
[98092] [Word Plugin] Prepare Document Refresh function causes issues in docs with multiple repeating Sections
[98087] [Word Plugin] Tag Browser does not present the Tags relevant to the Context of the Repeating Section.
[97758] [Word Plugin] Content Blocks in ShareDo not presented within the Word Add-in
[96925] [Word Plugin] Issues logging into Word Add-in using DUO 2 step authentication
[98715] [Word Plugin] Tag Browser doesn’t display Document Tags within a Participant List within a Document Questionnaire.
[97035] [Work Type Change Rules] Needs to be updated to use the new budgets model
[97505] [Work Type Modeller] Feature page should hide features where parent is disabled
[99078] [Workflow] Execution engine processing role is crashing on environments upgraded to internal config server
[99020] [Workflow] It is not clear from the workflow list views what “style” of workflow you have (Visual/Script)
[99128] [Workflow] Plans may potentially not show in the new plan list view
[97598] Admin (Dashboard / work type – page views) – When the length of time changes the associated graphs do not seem to change
[97420] Admin (dashboard) – The ‘No reporting data available’ message is displayed unexpectedly for the worktype and workbench widgets
[98967] B2B Portal – ‘404 content not found’ error when accessing B2B Portal
[98921] EE plan list view provider – edit button disabled when in legacy EE mode.
[91433] Emails breaking reporting
[99036] Emails don’t get participants copied from parent (sync rules)
[90138] Execution Engine – Issue using the “create-sharedo” command and saving the Aspect
[96479] HTML Emails. Toolbar goes missing if scroll down body of email.
[96417] iManage Repistory – using a rootPath in the configuration causes problems in repo explorer and elsewhere
[94686] Inbound emails containing the ‘base’ tag can change the base URL and break subsequent AJAX calls
[99144] Maintenance plan is needed to clear up internal config service console logs
[96959] Matter (Fee structure widget): Non-stop progress wheel after submitting a new version
[97760] Matter (participants / defendant role) – The associated participant was duplicated so that one of them also had a missing role
[86342] Modeller(approvals model / new model) – A newly created model is not displayed for all document templates
[98558] Multi Party Document Generation – Sending out emails via delivery channel can cause conflicts due to concurrency
[98811] Payment Plans – Cancelled Invoice – repayments calculation and amounts still show the original 4000 due
[98815] Payment Plans – Change Payor on Invoice – Able to Unlink and add a new Payor
[98816] Payment Plans – Fixed Time Period – +1 year – Start Today – Unexpected Repayment calculation behaviour
Thompsons Scotland selects ShareDo to drive process and customer journey improvements
Thompsons Solicitors Scotland began a comprehensive strategic review of their IT systems in late 2021. One of the main outcomes of their strategic review was the need to replace their existing Proclaim case management system, so that the firm could complete a transition to the cloud. This would enable them to better adapt to the current and future challenges the firm was facing in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
Thompsons transformation team reviewed all the leading case management systems in the market and narrowed down their selection to two suppliers. The firm then conducted a production quality Proof Of Concept for one of their practice groups, which they presented back to the firm’s partners. After a 3-month proof of concept with an ever-increasing scope, ShareDo was selected by the firm’s partners and IT team.
Ben Nicholson – Head of Product at ShareDo, states:
“Here at ShareDo we have enjoyed collaborating with a forward-thinking and driven IT team, and a Scottish law firm that understands the need to transform in order to support their lawyers. Our domain expertise and experience in the Scottish market was invaluable in supporting Thompsons’ strategic decision.”
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
Horwich Farrelly selects ShareDo to accelerate growth
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
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
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’
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
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
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
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- Seamlessly store documents to your document repository tool
- Use Sharedo virtual data rooms to securely share and collaborate on documents
- Use workflow to trigger actions based on the upload of documents
- 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.
- Use ShareDo competencies to define the skills of your users and teams
- 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.
- Round robin and ‘busyness’ capabilities allow you to allocate tasks based on resource workload as well as capability
- 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
- 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.