Maurice Blackburn Expects Significant Productivity Lift
from the Elite® 3E Automated Matter Management Processes
Maurice Blackburn, one of Australia’s leading plaintiff law firms, has gone live on Elite 3E, rolling out a version of the advanced practice and financial management system configured specifically to meet its unique billing and reporting requirements.
An intense implementation and development programme that began in January this year, culminated in a go-live transition in early September that Chief Financial Officer Neil Mackay says was a smooth and successful transition.
“We have hardly missed a beat in production. We now have a state-of-the-art technology platform with extensive workflow capacity and configurability, thanks to 3E’s integrated development environment.”
Acting in the interests of individuals, as well as undertaking class action for shareholders and businesses who have suffered loss due to illegal corporate behaviour, Maurice Blackburn also offers a broad range of litigation services to the corporate sector.
Mackay says Maurice Blackburn’s unique business profile requires it to have a practice management system that encompasses law firm processes typical to most firms, whilst at the same time requiring a unique level of flexibility to accommodate its long work-in-progress lifecycles.
“The bulk of our work is characterised by lengthy work-in-progress cycles with multiple billing triggers towards the end of the matter,” says Mackay. “Critical to our business is the ability to quickly generate and distribute billing information based around an extensive set of billing rules, where manual processing creates cumbersome roadblocks to processing.”
Being a highly distributed business with 15 national offices across several legal jurisdictions, the management of the firm’s business rules is made even more challenging.
Mackay says 3E’s extensive business process platform has provided a powerful, yet simple, foundation for building the firm’s complex business rules directly into the software.
“With business rules native to the system, users interact with the interface while the system takes care of the rules, routing and authorisations, as well as the selection of appropriate templates and delivery methods.”
By enhancing the standard pro-forma process within 3E, Maurice Blackburn has developed a billing process which, from the initial generation of the invoice all the way through to sending the invoice out the door, only takes 10 clicks of a mouse.
“This level of efficiency is critical for ensuring the high numbers of transactions that are the foundation of our practice are processed in a timely manner, while keeping administration overheads low,” Mackay says.
With over 36,000 clients at any one time, effective matter management is critical to the practice. “Maintaining a close view of what we call ’book-to-bill’ is essential. We need to know the volume of our backlog and be able to catalogue and analyse exactly what type of work we are undertaking.”
He says the practice’s manually intensive, incremental approach to reporting is now a thing of the past. “Previously we would have had to create three or four different reports to extract the financial management data we needed. We have configured the system to have most of the key business data summarised on one page.”
Mackay says the system will also help improve Maurice Blackburn’s marketing efforts.
“We will now have much better visibility of our prospective business and our conversion success rate. We can then analyse those conversion rates by referral source, which will help us manage our advertising spend to much greater effect.”
Mackay says he can see the firm continuing to implement further functionality within 3E over the next five years.
“The return on investment is expected to be significant and we should start to see it within the next financial year. I believe the benefits we can reap from this product are enormous.”
Kim Massana, senior vice president of Global Marketing and Product Management for Elite, says Maurice Blackburn’s implementation of Elite 3E provides an excellent example of how firms can benefit from implementing a new technology platform, not constrained by legacy architecture.
According to Massana, “Elite 3E’s integrated development environment has allowed the firm to control the end user interface, meaning each user has a unique experience of the system relevant to the role they undertake. All the information needed to make decisions at any stage of the matter is present on one screen and this simple improvement has an estimated time-saving of around 20 minutes per day, per legal assistant.This, together with a less time-consuming ability to process and generate bills, will radically improve efficiency and provide measurable return on investment into the future.”