How Access Legal's Practice Management enables growth for the UK’s largest family law firm – Stowe Family Law
Stowe Family Law is the largest specialist family law firm in the UK.
Founded in Leeds in 1982, the practice employs 180 people in 23 different offices, and services around 2,600 clients at any one time. Staff and clients alike enjoy the enormous benefits that come from utilising the Access Legal Practice Management solution.
John Anderson, a digital marketing consultant at Stowe Family Law, spoke to us about how the software has enabled success for the business.
Why Access Legal?
We felt that Access Legal provided a solution in their software that would evolve as the firm did. Stowe Family Law is the UK’s largest specialist family law firm – our goal was to become even bigger and we knew Access Legal would scale along with our own growth.
There was a six-month process to determine which Case Management software to go with. After initial research, we asked four companies to present their solution to our working group – which contained a mix of management, lawyers, finance and secretarial staff. We scored each one based on our requirements, and Access Legal was the clear leading supplier.
Access Legal scored strongly overall, but particularly in the areas of flexibility, scalability and data.
Flexibility-wise, our fee earners appreciated the pre-built workflows, but also were impressed they would be given space to work with the autonomy in a way that suits them.
In terms of scalability, it was clear Access Legal could be built and developed in line with how the business was projected to grow.
And with regards to data, we liked the fact we would have the ability to manage, measure and report on all activity – from initial enquiry through to billing – across a significant number of locations throughout the UK.
Stowe Family Law was paper-based previously. This is our first experience with a Case Management system, and we’re happy to have moved into the current century, removing manual ways of working from our business.
What is the primary use of Access Legal for you?
We do lots with Access Legal. Aside from utilising the standard features such as time recording and billing, which has saved our employees an incredible amount of time and made the firm extremely efficient, Access Legal is also our enquiry and referral management system.
The fact that we can handle enquiries and referrals in the same system we handle cases has proven to be massively beneficial. Our Management Information is also stored in Access Legal, so its use is very widespread throughout the firm.
Each of our family lawyers uses Access Legal, as do their secretaries, the marketing team and the finance department. In total that’s around 180 employees – and our clients, which stands at approximately 2,600, are confident in the way we effectively manage their case due to the efficiency of process, data security and accuracy of billing.
When we initially opted for Access Legal it was launched across 16 locations. Since then we’ve opened several new offices and that number now stands at 23.
What are the benefits of Access Legal?
One of the biggest benefits of Access Legal is the data and insights it has provided to our firm. This information is used to help make key decisions throughout the business – whether it’s determining the outcome of a day-to-day or a boardroom level issue.
The consistency in which our employees can work also enables us to effectively manage risk. The fact that multiple individuals can see the progress of a case means we’re not overly reliant on one person. We’ve also been able to reduce our overall lawyer to secretary ratio due to the efficiencies generated by Proclaim.
How configurable is Access Legal software?
We’re very happy with how configurable Access Legal is. We actually recruited a Access Legal developer to work internally, so we can move very quickly to design, build and test new functionality.
If you were to look at our Access Legal system you would see a number of bespoke elements that we consider key to our way of working. For example, our new enquiry management process, an initial client care letter creation feature, and risk assessments.
It’s highly likely we’ll be doing more of this in the future. We constantly review our way of working and tailor the workflows accordingly – and this will continue.
How does Access Legal suit your ongoing needs?
We see Access Legal as the foundation on which we will continue to grow the business.
We’re only two years in. But now we’ve embedded the system and will continue to build on the foundations we’ve created. We’ve found it very easy to train 50+ new users on the system, who all joined the business after implementation.
And it’s that usability that will keep Access Legal as a central part of our company in the years to come.
