LexisNexis
How William Roberts bolstered their legal research solutions with Lexis Advance®
16 December 2022 05:55
Background
William Roberts is a dynamic and innovative law firm with a focus on dispute resolution, litigation, and personal, commercial and property transactions. Since being founded in Sydney by Robert Ishak and Bill Pertrovski in 2005, the firm has grown steadily, now employing 60 people across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Singapore. The firm’s success has come from its singular focus on clients. By remaining committed to establishing and improving client relationships, William Roberts has expanded its remit and grown its client base.
Challenge
“We offer a broad range of expertise to our clients,” says Robert Ishak, Principal & Chairman at William Roberts Lawyers. “Ranging from Commercial Litigation to Bankruptcy and Insolvency, Contracts, Insurance, Class Actions, Consumer Protection and Civil Procedure. This presents us with a particular set of challenges when it comes to ensuring our lawyers have the best legal research tools available for our clients.” William Roberts adopts a hybrid approach to its legal research solutions, opting for a broad range of resources to acquire the knowledge lawyers need - and no doubt familiar to many other firms - they have a need to minimise time and cost expenditure for legal research.
Enter Lexis Advance.
The Solution
“Lexis Advance makes it easier to access cases and helps improve time efficiencies,” says Robert. “We’re also able to utilise the various tools and features to help understand the treatment of cases, and quickly find relevant legislation.” By doing this, Lexis Advance positively impacts the way William Roberts is able to deliver legal services to their clients.
With the help of Lexis Advance, William Roberts can provide on-time and accurate advice to clients, frame legal issues, and analyse facts thoroughly.
The solution provides numerous efficiencies to William Roberts that specifically address the firm’s unique challenges. Things like being able to trace the thread of a particular legal principle; locate cases and relevant publications quickly; access headnote summaries to guide research avenues; and reference paragraphs to quickly identify other cases. All of this dovetails with the platform’s efficient navigation and recall speed to provide an efficient experience to clients.
“For example, when we work on a trust matter, we’re able to review the law through Halsbury’s® Laws of Australia, where we can reference legislation and cases of relevance,” says Robert.
Through CaseBase® we can follow that thread to other relevant cases referring to the original case reviewed. This is a great way in which we can quickly and clearly access the resources we need during the research process.
Lexis Advance has provided significant benefit for William Roberts across five primary areas:
- Reducing legal costs for the firm
- Improving operational efficiency when searching for legal matters and list of authorities
- Consistent court compliance when submitting official reports for list of authorities
- Increased client satisfaction in terms of service delivery as a result of attention to research and client advice, and approach to matters
- Stronger knowledge sharing across the firm through collaboration and the folder sharing capabilities in Lexis Advance
Our experience overall has been excellent.
“Not only does the product deliver and support our teams with legal research, but the customer service from LexisNexis is outstanding. Their email and phone support is rapid and effective, especially when a resource may be out of scope or when organising training seminars.”
Key Features for William Roberts
While there are many challenges intrinsic to the business of law as a whole, each firm has its own ways of working and its own unique means of undertaking its work. There are a range of features that William Roberts has found particularly valuable by using Lexis Advance.
- Quick find and Advanced Search as powerful tools to find relevant cases and links
- Treatment of cases, hyperlinked citations, and folder creation for knowledge sharing in CaseBase
- Email alerts keep the firm up to date with current developments and changes in practice areas
- Boolean searches, treatment tables and paragraph locator features
- Ability to colour search terms makes reviewing cases for relevance much more efficient
- Full case text on a single page makes the process of searching far easier
“The search history and advanced search features are the most useful,” says Robert. “In particular, the advanced search feature allows us to find case law that is relevant to a particular section of legislation - this is extremely useful in backing up an opinion
or realising that a paragraph has not seen much support.”
Overall? It’s fair to say Robert is a supporter of Lexis Advance. “LexisNexis promotes excellencein the legal profession. It streamlines our research and allows the saving of key cases for ease of recall and access.”
Related Customer Stories
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While David Sigler has extensive experience in technology law, he is often confronted with situations where he is acting for technology companies, but his clients require advice on other aspects of their business. “With LexisNexis resources, I can do about 80 per cent of employment issues that come up with my clients”. David estimates that with LexisNexis, he can conduct research in 20 per cent of the time it would otherwise take. -
Marc Jaku had to satisfy two imperatives to exceed his clients’ expectations: finding an affordable research solution that would meet his boutique practice’s budget, while efficiently accessing trusted research content. This is where Lexis Advance, clearly comes into play. Lexis Advance has been able to save Mar valuable time and money, and importantly continues to ensure his reputation is protected. “Lexis Advance is definitely valuable and one of its most relevant and beneficial features is CaseBase. Within CaseBase, I really like how it addresses which cases have been followed, if a judgment has been applied in other cases or overturned. Having these resources cuts down the time I would need to spend on research.” -
“Offering expertise across so many areas of law comes with its challenges,” says Joint Principal Mitchell Zadow. In the past, the firm conducted research using a number of sources, including free sites, online resources, and their own on-site library. “Doing things this way was time-consuming, and inefficient,” says Zadow. Sharrock Pitman decided to implement Lexis Advance. According to Zadow “Lexis Advance has proved to be a game changer in supporting the growth, research skills, and professional development of the firm’s junior lawyers.”