The pandemic, property tax and day-to-day business – law firms have had their hands full for some time now. So how sensible is it to add yet another issue to the firm’s agenda right now? In the first few months of the pandemic, the Digitalisation consultancy On everyone’s lips. Demand was high, whilst supply was limited. But what about today? In this episode, our Customer Success Manager Samuel discusses the impact of these changes and the training opportunities available.

Digitalisation consultancy can help a law firm move forward in two ways. One advantage is obvious: a new service always presents opportunities for new business. However, another aspect is often overlooked: the firm drives forward its own digitalisation, thereby optimising its processes. Samuel would like to address these points today, starting with the classic dilemma triangle: time, quality and resources. If one of the three corners is utilised, the other two are neglected. So if a process takes time, quality and resources are neglected. Digitalisation tackles the time factor to conserve resources and improve quality by increasing efficiency.

From my own experience

Samuel illustrates how this might work in practice using the example of the product Opti.Tax Land Tax. Once the order is received, a payment request is sent. Ideally, the product is paid for and the order is entered into hsp’s ticketing system. At this point, an email is automatically sent to the new customer asking for details of their IT service provider. The reply to this message is also recorded in the ticketing system. The licence is then generated.

Up until now, the subsequent process had not been automated. So a licence would be created. After that, cloud access was configured and the licence’s API token was stored. Once all that was done, the licence could finally be sent out. This entire process took about 15 minutes on average. That may not sound like much at first. However, if you extrapolate those 15 minutes across 100, 200 or more orders, it quickly adds up to several days. So, a colleague at hsp sat down to write a script to automate the workflows. All manual data entry and registration steps were incorporated into the script. Now, when the script is run, staff are only asked to answer a few verification questions on screen. Otherwise, the process runs automatically.

Invest time to save time

The whole process now takes just three minutes. That’s a time saving of 80 per cent. Of course, one person had to be assigned to the task whilst the script was being developed. However, this investment of time quickly paid off. Countless hours are now being saved, freeing up resources for other projects and developments. Essentially, that is the main idea behind digitalisation: investing time to save even more time.

That is why hsp launched the ‘Digitalisation Consultancy’ professional development course a year and a half ago. This course enables law firms to bring expertise into their teams and optimise their own processes. Furthermore, it is worthwhile to make collaboration with clients more efficient and convenient for both parties. As a further step, the law firm can offer digitalisation consultancy as a service in its own right, for example to optimise its clients’ processes.

Digitalisation helps improve quality

Digitalisation is therefore not about replacing staff and turning the practice upside down. Rather, process optimisation can free up resources that contribute to quality assurance or even improve quality. Nor does this require any IT or programming skills. Nowadays, there are numerous tools and resources available that make it very easy to integrate digital processes into existing workflows.

The „Digitalisation Consultant“ course, including all its components, can be booked via hsp.community. There are numerous fascinating modules on topics such as Low-code/no-code Whether it’s GoBD, process modelling and visualisation, or facilitation training, these courses give the firm a real edge. The course is kept up to date and is regularly expanded with new modules.