GT Stewart radically restructures police station client onboarding with FormShare from Tikit

Read how GT Stewart used Tikit (an Advanced company) FormShare automation and P4W to radically restructure police station client inception and make criminal law financially viable

GT Stewart was set up in 2003 by a group of lawyers who wanted to fight for clients irrespective of their ability to pay. Today’s firm has 175 staff across a national network of offices.

It has been nominated and shortlisted for many legal awards and is recommended in the leading legal directories, Chambers UK and the Legal 500.

From the outset, the firm recognised that the climate for publicly funded work was increasingly adverse. By 2018, it had withstood a decade’s worth of Legal Aid fee cuts, but to continue in its mission to practice criminal defence law – an area of practice which makes a loss the vast majority of the time – the firm had to find a way to radically cut costs. An opportunity to do so was presented by Tikit’s FormShare software.

GT Stewart had participated in a Tikit P4W User Group initiative in which 14 firms had pooled their resources to each develop a form they needed using FormShare. This showed GT Stewart what could be achieved, so in June 2018 work began in earnest on progressing an automated police station on-boarding form.

What GT Stewart needed

• A way to drastically lower the costs of police station client inception in order to increase the financial viability of giving criminal law clients access to justice.

GT Stewart gained

• A Tikit Formshare form which is used to collect client data at police stations • Automation of the administrative processes of client on-boarding within P4W
• Enhanced data security, accuracy, completeness and compliance
• An average 35 minute time-saving per onboarded client, equating 1,166 hours saved or around 7 months’ worth of administrative time annually.

The challenge

An automated form could make a huge difference because it took a lot of administration to onboard criminal law clients. The process was messy, time-consuming and therefore costly, starting with manual form-filling at a police station, followed by the manual keying of information into the firm’s database once a physical form was back at the office. As admin personnel struggled to decipher the handwriting of others, it was error-prone. As pieces of paper piled up, it was insecure. And since the information might be incomplete, there was every chance of further delay which could negatively impact on client experience.

This was even before the data could be used to manually start creating new client and matter files. This process also had a big impact on the client’s access to justice because data gathered at the police station is used not just for inception, but also for the client’s defence in the hours, days and months to follow.

GT Stewart’s challenge was to use Tikit FormShare software to streamline and automate as much of the work as possible in order to reduce costs and improve data quality and security. Simultaneously they wanted to create a process so simple, compliant and secure that even the most technophobic lawyer would instantly see the benefits and adopt it.