Document management software supports Silversmiths’ business plan

Legal Aid specialist, Silversmiths LLP, is a two-site practice based in Southport and Bootle. With plans for increased fee earner mobility, Silversmiths is moving its critical applications to the cloud.

The challenge:

“We want to cut down on dead time”, explains Nick Archer, Managing Partner at Silversmiths. “By using hosted systems, our fee earners can work from the office, home, court, anywhere. They can literally input time from their iPads. Mobile working means that no time is wasted and every piece of fee earning activity is captured”.

As existing clients of the Pinpoint outsourced legal cashiering service, the firm has migrated to the hosted Interactive legal accounting and case management software with full document management capabilities.

The solution:

“Our objective is to expand our electronic files to equal that of our paper records over the next 12 months”, adds Nick. “It’s all part of becoming more efficient and heading towards a paperless office vision. We can’t entirely replace our paper files, though, as Legal Aid rules dictate the maintenance of printed documents”.

The add-on document management module enables Silversmiths to create documentation from templates and store centrally in the cloud.

“Another one of our aims was to introduce standardisation”, clarifies Nick. “That’s why we’ve set up Word templates with built in merge fields. The benefits are twofold – our fee earners can generate their own letters with less reliance on support staff and a consistent suite of outbound correspondence means we present ourselves as a unified team.

“The central electronic data store gives us easy access to matter files over the internet from any device, be it smartphone, tablet, laptop or PC. Even better, it’s Quill’s job to manage and back it up, saving us the server space, IT maintenance task and worry of security”.

User training was addressed in two stages. This staggered approach covered the practice management and legal accounts software features initially, with document management training undertaken at a later date.

The future:

“We didn’t want to overwhelm our users by teaching them everything at once”, concludes Nick. “The Quill training team devised a two-step training plan for us. Our trainer was excellent and the training comprehensive. From sales demonstration right through to end user training, our experience has been extremely positive. The Quill software fully supports our business plan. We anticipate a long future as their client”.