How Hedges Law, a 225-year-old firm, modernised its practice during Covid-19
Hedges Law embraced the benefits of cloud-based technology to enable its lawyers and staff to work flexibly from anywhere while providing the best service and advice to their clients.
Hedges Law is a modern 225-year-old firm with core practice areas in family law, private client, property law, and dispute resolution. It has a unique experience in implementing Actionstep, which works as an end-to-end cloud-based legal practice management system, via a fully virtual onboarding process during the Covid-19 lockdown.
Challenges:
Before implementing Actionstep, Hedges Law had immense challenges in the reliability of the platform it was using, the complexity of onboarding, lack of flexibility, and ongoing reporting issues that restricted its ability to monitor and report the financial health of the business.
Procurement process:
The challenges that continued to restrict the growth of Hedges Law led to an extensive search for a cloud-based practice management system. This process involved looking at online reviews and hearing from real customers about its experience with the given software providers. It was a matter of weeks before Hedges Law chose Actionstep and began the migration process.
The key decision-making criteria were:
- SaaS technology
- Fully integrated accounting system
- Cost-effective
- Rapid workflow customisation
- API integrations with other leading cloud services
- Full G Suite integration
Hedges Law then undertook a comprehensive feature analysis against its current provider and found significant functional benefits at a lower operational cost – SaaS was the way to go and provided more reliability, scalability, and security at a lower cost.
Migration and implementation:
Hedges Law invested in the Cloudify Legal workflows to implement Actionstep quickly and apply best practices for property, family, private client, litigation, and compliance. The timeline from project kick-off to starting to use its Actionstep system was three months. Cloudify Legal continues to support Hedges Law to further its understanding of how Actionstep can help the business.
As Hedges Law began the implementation stage, the UK government announced Covid-19 lockdown measures, throwing a system upheaval in at the same time as these external events. Actionstep and Cloudify Legal advised Hedges Law to continue with the implementation of the software for staff to work virtually and continue to provide services for people in need. Users were successfully trained online using Google Meet, a core feature of G Suite, and the Google Cloud Platform.
Hedges Law embraced the benefits of cloud-based technology to enable its lawyers and staff to work flexibly from anywhere while providing the best service and advice to their clients.
Data migration:
Cloudify Legal provided a cost-effective data migration service of 35,000+ matters throughout the weekend, allowing Hedges Law to finish with its old system on a Friday and start fresh with Actionstep on the Monday following.
Benefits of using Actionstep:
Hedges Law found that payback on the implementation costs of Actionstep was measured in weeks. The firm could move away from the ‘break and fix’ model and instead allowed the investment of time and money into delivering significant operational efficiencies, boosting productivity. The tight integration of Actionstep with G Suite has allowed Hedges to significantly reduce operational costs while dramatically increasing operational flexibility. Data security has increased without the technical overhead and significant operational costs that are forced upon businesses by using traditional behind the firewall (or VPN) technology.
Staff at Hedges Law love the interface and intuitive nature of the system. The workflow automation and document templates have delivered significant operational efficiencies, improving client care, reducing risk, and most importantly keeping staff happy – allowing lawyers to be lawyers.
Actionstep forms the cornerstone of Hedges Law’s strategy of providing legal services anywhere, anytime, any device.
