Stewarts Law opts for Iphelion Outline

UK News

08
Jan
2015

Editor

Stewarts Law has implemented Iphelion’s Outline as the company’s template management system. Stewarts Law is the latest major legal firm to choose Outline following on from an impressive stream of business wins from Clyde & Co, Farrer & Co, Hill Hofstetter and Kennedys.

Stewarts Law LLP is the UK’s largest litigation only law firm and specialises in high value and complex disputes, acting for both corporate and individual clients. The firm, which has an annual turnover in excess of £40 million, is top ranked in both the Legal 500 and Chambers & Partners. Stewarts Law has offices in London and Leeds with a consulting office in New York.

Stewarts Law wanted to move on from their previous document creation system, as part of a software review that included adopting InterAction Customer Relationship Management system. They wanted a flexible, powerful method of managing their templates which was fully integrated with InterAction CRM. As part of the project scope, all documents and correspondence had to be in the house style, no matter where or by whom it was generated. It was also required to reflect the firm’s branding, core values and professional approach.

Having considered several alternatives, the project team decided that Iphelion Outline offered the ideal solution. “We chose Outline because we wanted a document template system that offered outstanding integration with our other core software packages. Outline seemed to deliver what we needed, without extraneous features that we’d have to pay a premium for and didn’t need,” commented James Mead, Head of IT at Stewarts Law

James continued, “We wanted to move quickly and Iphelion could match our pace. They were brilliant at coping with everything we threw at them. They were willing to provide custom features and delivered robust software quickly. The entire implementation from start to finish was surprisingly painless, with no hidden nasty surprises along the way.”

The company took the opportunity to review each template used in the business and rationalise the huge number of templates, leaving around 300 templates in use across the business’ accident litigation specialities. Most of these templates were set up by the firm’s word processing staff, who were trained by Iphelion, with IT staff on hand as needed. This ensured that all templates were fully up to date, with accurate content, delivered in the house style. This stage took around ten weeks, including the template review phase and training.

The pilot phase involved user acceptance testing and replacing the legacy desktop with Outline’s custom ribbon within Microsoft Word. The firm’s internal IT Trainers delivered user training to pilot users, including fee-earners and support staff across the business.

James added, “Both support staff and fee earners in the pilot study were surprised and delighted by how simple Iphelion Outline was to learn, meaning that training efforts could be focussed on the new CRM system. New templates proved simple to design and add to the system as this involved no programming skills or the need to use Iphelion or a third party to create new templates, avoiding bottlenecks when urgent new work was being undertaken. Outline was recognised as improving the balance of effort across the business, with far greater efficiency, accuracy and control of all aspects of document production”.

Iphelion Managing Director Andy Driskell confirmed, “Outline is increasingly being adopted by major law firms because of its superior integration with Word and market leading CRM systems. It’s simple to learn, improves efficiency and is remarkably cost-effective.

“It’s an ideal solution for legal businesses who want to improve their control and use of document templates, without the need to use a third party to generate or change templates as the business evolves. Outline is intuitive, flexible and robust, so partners, lawyers and support staff love it and the IT department benefits as well.”