Lexis+^® provides the speed and confidence to enable Natale Ricciardi the time to build his growing practice

The introduction of technology is rapidly evolving the legal sector, enabling lawyers to focus more on their clients, future business development, and growing their teams.

Background

Natale is a Practice Director at Frichot Lawyers and leads their management team. He has been directly involved in restructuring the firm, upgrading the information technology systems, relocating its offices in Fremantle to the Manning Buildings, refining financial control and reporting processes and developing strategies that underpin the firm’s plans for further growth. Natale is passionate about guiding and mentoring law graduates and junior lawyers on their journey towards a rewarding and fulfilling legal career.

Challenge

Natale wanted to arm his team with the best resources available to enable Frichot to compete against larger firms. One major area of focus was the need to streamline and speed up legal research, while maintaining the highest standards of accuracy and comprehensiveness.

Solution & Outcomes

“I’ve seen first-hand the evolution of Lexis^® resources over the last five years, obviously listening to customer feedback, and making their tools far more intuitive and accessible,” said Natale. “I feel our investment in LexisNexis^® has leveled us up against much larger law firms.”

Frichot Lawyers recently upgraded to Lexis+, a powerful, new intuitive platform which promises simplicity, efficiency and confidence. Natale enjoys the speed, new look and feel, plain language search and the simple training available within Lexis+.

“With Lexis+, the speed at which we can do our research, and the confidence we have in the results, has been a complete game changer. You ask questions within the system and you get immediate answers, and together with supplementary resources and robust ‘help’ tools, we have seen a significant reduction in training and onboarding time due to the intuitiveness of the platform. Personally, I had a 30-minute training session and immediately felt confident using the platform,” he said.

“The case summarisation is outstanding, cutting down reading time due to the simple display and cluster of summarisations. This function alone has considerably sped up our research process. We would estimate a minimum 25% time saving on research, and more importantly, I’m significantly more confident with the results than before Lexis+,” he said.

Natale has been using the LexisNexis resource, Practical Guidance, for more than five years, and believes it is an excellent training tool for lawyers: “I’m pleased Practical Guidance has been incorporated within Lexis+.

I use the succession module, and having access to precedents relating to complex probate applications, together with a handful of other sources, I’m able to produce highly accurate, relevant documents at speed, and have them processed by the court without requisitions.”

“With the support of this tool, we have built a positive reputation at the Court for submitting high quality, easily digestible and thorough documentation that is processed in less than a third of the time it takes the Court on average,” he said.

“Practical Guidance is often the starting point for all our junior lawyers within our firm, and truly streamlines the documentation development process,” he said.

Natale is also complimentary of Argument Analyser, an AI-powered case law research tool, and is excited to use this more in the future:
“Argument Analyser has the potential to tighten arguments up and can be used for both my position, and also my opponent’s, enabling me to identify opportunities and gaps on both sides of the argument”.

“I’m a big supporter of AI as a tool to gain a competitive edge. In my view AI won’t do all the work for you, but it can do a lot of heavy lifting with great speed – without sacrificing quality”.

“With support from Lexis+, the documentation prepared by our junior lawyers is of a very high standard, which significantly reduces the time I need to allocate to rework. In turn, this enables me to spend more time on marketing and growing our practice,” he said.

Natale has become a strong ambassador for the adoption of new technology, however, he notes a positive ‘human touch’ can never be underrated:
“We love the LexisNexis technology, but I also couldn’t be more complimentary of our account management.”

“We believe LexisNexis has taken the time to understand our business, and curate bespoke solutions to best meet our requirements. We have regular check-ins to ensure we are optimising all available resources, and that our solution continues to meet the demands of our growing practice,” he said.

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