RW Blears LLP Case Study
By Charlotte Sturridge
Please could give a quick overview of your company?
We are a law firm. We do corporate, regulatory and tax law. There are around 16 members of the team. 7 partners, some consultants, a trainee solicitor and a couple of paralegals and then me. I'm the practice manager and so I deal with the day-to-day running of the firm and the finances for the firm. We don't have any support staff or anything. It's just me.
"It's less stressful because they know somebody else can help who actually knows what they're doing."
Where were you in your business before you started working with Kellie Simpson Ltd?
We didn't have any support staff. Admin and secretarial work was dealt with by the fee earner, tidying up their own documents as far as they could. Anything slightly more difficult or time-consuming would be sent to me, which is not my specialty, so it was shared between us really. We didn't really have the need for a full-time secretary at the firm because the documents and the admin stuff is not every day. It's quite ad hoc so it was just the fee earners or myself trying to work through documents as best as we can.
What challenges/problems necessitated a change?
I think we just got busier to be honest and we’ve grown over the last couple of years.
There’s a higher volume of documents coming through and as fee earners are busier, there's then a higher focus on them actually doing billable work rather than admin work. As a result of the firm being busier, I'm busier on the management side and the finance side so I haven't got the spare time to help on documents like I used to. Some of the queries and the documents that come over are in a state and as I don't know how to fix them most of the time, that was when we realised we need help.
We've got a couple of consultants who work for themselves and we asked them, what do you do? They are generally older and probably used to having, when they were at bigger firms, a personal secretary and a couple of them suggested that they use virtual assistants. We thought, actually that sounds like that could work for us.
What were you looking for in a solution?
I think it was mainly just an extra pair of hands but I think that the key thing was the flexibility. As I say, we didn't need someone full time and we wouldn’t have enough work for somebody full-time. If you employ someone two or three days a week, it will of course happen that the days that they are in, you don't have the documents for them to work on. And then the other days you are short and have to wait for them to come in. That was the key thing that it was somebody that was flexible, that we could call on as and when we need which is why it's worked really well.
"Before Kellie, the fee earners were spending too much time doing admin tasks when their role is to fee earn and give legal advice."
What were the major pain points of your process prior to using our service?
I think just the fact that the fee earners were spending too much time doing admin tasks when their role is to fee earn and give legal advice. They’re very, very busy. They can't be spending even half an hour a day trying to tidy up a document or work out why the formatting is out and things like that when they're not experts in that. They've got quite a high hourly rate so they should be billing for actual legal work. That was the hard thing. They don't want to be doing that and it doesn’t make business sense for them to be doing that.
By using our service, can you measure any improvements in productivity or time savings?
I've only recently been looking at proper billing. We've now got a better system so we're able to measure more accurately billable time. I don't have exact figures, but I can definitely see that fee earners are spending more time actually doing legal work. When you would go through the figures before they would be saying oh I spent however long that day doing this. You would see it on their time sheets. There has definitely been an impact in billable time which is key for any business.
has the investment been worthwhile?
Yes.
would you recommend us?
Yes!
What’s been the biggest impact/advantage in using our service?
Less stress, especially for the team who find it very stressful when you can't work out the formatting and things aren't looking quite right and things are jumping around here there and everywhere. Playing around with that especially when you're busy is just really stressful. I think its been really good that they know that if it's not right they can e-mail it to me and I can e-mail it on to Kellie. We know that it always comes back really quickly and tidy.
They often even pick up other bits. For us, it’s just what it looks like. It needs to look good, but we don't know the background of that. Often, they will tidy up other things that might not necessarily be a problem then but if the documents to be edited, it would become a problem. They’ve also set up some templates for the team as well which works most of the time. The problem is when the fee earners get a document in and then they do amendments to it and then it doesn't look right. Whereas Kellie and the team have set up some templates so if the team are doing things from scratch, we've got that to work from. Unless they do something crazy, it generally works. I think that's the biggest thing, it's less stressful because they know they can just do their job and somebody else can help who actually knows what they're doing.
"There has definitely been an impact in billable time which is key for any business."
Would you say that the investment in the services has been worthwhile so far?
Yes definitely. Yes. Less stress and it's better for everyone really. Better for me not having to deal with it and the fee earners can do what they do best.
Would you recommend the services to a colleague or a client?
Oh definitely, yeah. We definitely are. I think even a couple of our consultants, if they're doing work with us, they’ll obviously send it over to Kellie and the team but I think they have always been impressed as well. They’ve got other clients that they work for as well so they will definitely suggest using the team to those. A lot of the firms that we work opposite are quite large firms. A lot of them will probably have in-house but any small teams, we definitely would.
Charlotte Surridge, Practice Manager at RW Blears LLP
Why do you do business with us?
The documents always have a very quick turnaround. They are always sorted out and presented well, Kellie is always happy to help and I know sometimes, if she can't do it she will pass it on to one of her associates.
The associates of hers I have spoken to have been great. We've actually recently instructed a couple of her BD associates and they've been doing some tasks. Particularly Jo at the moment, she's been doing loads of work. Absolutely great. The feedback from the team, if they've had correspondence with her directly, has been great and it feels like they are part of the team.
It's quite nice that the team are comfortable contacting Kellie and her team themselves sometimes, rather than come through me, which is then much quicker than going through a middle person. I think that that works really well because we've got quite a good relationship with Kellie now and her team. It just works really well.
We know that we can rely on them for a quick turnaround and good work. Everything's been reasonably priced as well, which always helps. They're very good at being transparent with how long things have taken and why or why the cost of certain things is more than others. We’ve never had any issues or queries on that side which makes it really, really helpful and easy for me.
Is there anything else that you wanted to share?
Just that we are really happy with the work that Kellie and her team do. We've been using Kellie for a couple of years but it was very ad hoc, but Kellie will tell you, over the last 5 or 6 months we've used her a lot more. We are a lot busier and have got a higher volume.
We are recruiting and have possibly three new lawyers starting early next year so we are only going to be sending more over which is great. I if you are expanding you need to know that you've got the support as well. Because we don't have that in-house, and I can't imagine we will ever need it in-house, so it's good to know that we've got Kellie, and she's got an expanding team as well, so that she can always help.
She has never come back and said we're too busy, we can't do it. There might be days where things are not back the same day, but most of the time that's fine anyway. It's good to know that she is expanding as well so that we've got her there to help us when we need it.