The challenge
When eBrief Ready became residents of Lander & Rogers’ LawTech Hub powered by YBF Ventures in 2019, there was no consistent approach to the sharing of briefs between solicitors, barristers, courts and other parties involved in matters. In a profession built on rules and precedents, it is surprising that something as necessary and routine as sharing briefs had no industry-wide standard to improve collaboration and productivity.
Skip forward 12 months, throw in a global pandemic and a seismic shift in the manner in which nearly all sectors are operating, and it has become even more essential to establish an industry best practice approach to briefing barristers.
The existing work processes were outdated, and the opportunity cost of low productivity caused by an absence in streamlined delivery, indexing, discovery and searching, were immense. So as the world expected the legal profession to do ‘more with less,’ standardising and digitising brief delivery was an obvious, secure and fast way to do just that.
The LawTech Hub, a joint venture between law firm Lander & Rogers and YBF Ventures, is a place where lawyers, technology entrepreneurs and business experts develop and refine transformative legal tech products and solutions. As a firm, Lander & Rogers aim to deliver exceptional, environmentally conscious legal services to their clients.
So how could the eBrief Ready platform support all of this and bring solutions to the table for busy legal professionals?
The solution
eBrief Ready initiated a pilot with founding member Lander & Rogers. Over a period of four months, the numbers of those using eBrief Ready grew from approximately 50 to over 100. During that period and, as a result of constant pressure testing, 15 new features were built into the eBrief Ready platform – each geared towards increasing efficiencies, collaboration and, streamlining the delivery of briefs.
Lander & Rogers used eBrief Ready extensively, uploading more than 250,000 pages. In addition to being able to deliver briefs, they were able to:
- easily work collaboratively with colleagues, clients and stakeholders
- manage and organise thousands of documents automatically
- share information instantly without clogging inboxes with large attachments
- quickly search through thousands of pages with instant scan-to-text (OCR) technology
- automatically compile, index and paginate court books to present them in a professional and court-friendly manner.
The results
Throughout the pilot and ever since, the outcomes associated with being ‘eBrief Ready’ have been profound for Lander & Rogers.
Using the platform has been an enormous contributor to the firm’s paperlite strategy – helping Lander & Rogers reduce costs on printing, storage and delivery, as well as countless hours of administrative time managing physical documents.
One particular file the team worked on, required 13,500 pages to be uploaded onto the eBrief Ready platform. Such is the user friendly nature of the software, this substantial volume posed no issues. The Lander & Rogers team were able to easily create an entirely workable, searchable, hyperlinked court book that they were able to share digitally, not only with their barristers, but clients too.
The time taken to actually physically compile the PDF brief, once the relevant documents had been identified by the lead solicitor, was measured to be ten times faster – now taking just 15 minutes, down from 2.5 hours. This represented a huge increase in productivity, not to mention the positive flow on effects for staff morale and wellbeing.
With Lander & Rogers being able to make such a substantial time saving on brief compilation, it’s easy to see how large gains can be made for law firms seeking to improve their workflow with eBrief Ready.
3 key takeaways
- eBrief Ready is so much more than just a conduit between solicitors and barristers to share briefs. It’s a way to automate many manually intensive processes in the legal industry.
- The software is scalable across your entire firm. It neatly complements existing workflow processes and eliminates the wasteful elements of it.
- Put to the test by not only Lander & Rogers, the software is being used by over 5,000 solicitors and more than 1,000 barristers across Australia. eBrief Ready is constantly evolving as a result of working closely with users.