If “necessity is the mother of invention”, then COVID-19 has certainly proved to be the mother of accelerated innovation in the Australian Legal Profession.
In the not so distant past, working remotely as a Solicitor or Barrister we were told was a perk. An unorthodox lifestyle choice. A nice idea, but an approach too difficult for the demands of an age-old profession like law. Something we typically saw bookkeepers of a firm doing, not so much other legal professionals within the office. Almost overnight, many lawyers and particularly many Barristers who depended on a brick-and-mortar, paper-driven practice were forced to change the way they do business and for some the task felt nearly impossible. How did we help them succeed?
Whilst SILQ has had a cloud solution for some time, clients still needed software installed onto their devices in order to be able to use it. What COVID-19 meant for us was that at the start of March we were not only forced ourselves to embrace the work from home model, but inundated with clients calling in to get access to their data and documents from home – many often not having access to their work desktop computers.
This meant we had to accelerate our purely Online solution to allow clients the option to move around from device to device without having to worry about “is the software installed on this machine?”. “My child is home schooling from the laptop, I only have my iPad available at the moment.”
Our focus then became on innovation, not just to finalise our build of a purely Online version. We asked ourselves; how do we ensure we maximise the integrations with other providers to allow clients to not only use our practice management software online, but able to use other products purely online also?
We achieved this through a number of integrations. A robust example of this being the integration with Microsoft Office 365, which includes OneDrive & SharePoint:
- Solicitors & Barristers can have their matters saved in SILQ using Australian Servers.
- They can generate documents directly Online and saved against a matter.
- Documents are stored on OneDrive or SharePoint (so SILQ does not control their IP or client documents).
- Within SILQ they can send an email using their own email address, which shows up in the sent items in Outlook Online (and desktop).
- That email can be saved against the matter (live in mid-June).
- Any documents already saved in SILQ (perhaps by a colleague) can be opened via OneDrive/SharePoint and edited using Microsoft Word Online.
Similarly, Dropbox users can manage their documents in this way too.
All of the above now happens without having to leave a browser. By mid-June, Solicitors and Barristers will be able to do the same from a mobile device, not just a desktop, laptop or tablet. In a similar fashion to the above, other integrations like InfoTrack searches and certificates, InfoTrackID or SignIT means you can do all of these without leaving a browser also.
Whilst we expect some of our clients will eventually go back to rigid work-in-office policies, it’s expected that most will continue to use purely Online software across the board within their firms. In the past, I also thought managing our support and development team from home would be too difficult and not productive. What we as a company have learnt is having the digital infrastructure in place to support working from home at the drop of a hat is crucial in today’s uncertain environment. There are some benefits of work from home to employees and that in fact, it can be done effectively. If nothing else, having the infrastructure in place means staff are able to work from anywhere and finalise something urgent without having to wait to get back into the office. Being able to work Online doesn’t just mean you are prepared for the next pandemic, it means you are prepared for the next emergency and your firm will be able to thrive from anywhere.
Those companies able to use technology well to keep going and rethink their business model for the future by fast-tracking digital transformation, will be ones ahead of their competition.
