Background
With origins dating back to the 1860s, Lane Neave is a full service law firm offering a broad range of specialist legal solutions including corporate, commercial, resource management, insolvency and employment law. The recipient of the Concordia National Employment Law Award in 2007, Lane Neave has an extensive range of clients throughout New Zealand including State Owned Enterprises, corporates and individuals, serviced by a team of 100 staff.
Identifying the Need for Change
As one of the top 20 law firms in New Zealand, Lane Neave is focused on maintaining its long-standing reputation of delivering the highest quality service to its clients. Lane Neave’s lawyers spend significant time conducting legal research, analysing material relevant to a client’s matter and reviewing numerous documents each day. Working more effectively and managing daily workflow in a fast-paced, information-intensive environment is essential.
Lane Neave’s current practice management software provided a basic system for managing client information. However, it lacked sophistication and integration across Lane Neave’s business and did not facilitate sharing of legal knowledge amongst practitioners.
In 2005 Lane Neave decided that in order to keep providing high quality client results, employees needed a more sophisticated system for capturing, storing and retrieving documents and other communications with clients. There was also a lack of seamless integration between client financial information, workflow streams and practitioners’ time recording.
“Our current system was time consuming and inefficient - we knew there were better ways of managing and sharing information, supporting our practitioners’ workflows and being more integrated across our business” says Michelle Grant, Knowledge Manager - Lane Neave.
