Mills & Reeve enhanced drafting, standardised best practice, and improved delegation

THE CHALLENGE

The incumbent automation tool wasn’t meeting their needs

As a firm that constantly uses innovation to improve its products and services, Mills & Reeve was already using a document automation tool. However, the firm’s incumbent tool wasn’t fully meeting their needs and so the search began for a more robust and reliable replacement.

THE SOLUTION

A scalable and straightforward platform

Emma Jackson, Head of Legal Technology & Data at Mills & Reeve explained:

“We were already automating documents using another system so automation wasn’t entirely alien to us, however we found that what we were using wasn’t living up to its promises and was actually taking up a huge amount of our PSLs’ time trying to get it working. We wanted to move to a scalable and sustainable model that would be appropriate for the level of internal resource available.”

Emma continued:

“After researching all the options, we selected Clarilis. For us, the part of Clarilis’ proposition that stood out was having a product that’s developed by lawyers for lawyers, so they understand how the user is going to interact with the documents. On a lot of the systems we looked at, you have to go through a long questionnaire of often irrelevant points before you can access anything useful. Working through the Clarilis questionnaires is so straightforward by comparison.

For us, a huge benefit of Clarilis’ approach is having access to the resource required to get these things automated quickly. Seeing our PSLs talking to your PSLs, for me as a non-lawyer, means they may be speaking another language but at least they are both speaking the same one!”

THE BENEFITS

More productivity and great customer service

Emma outlined the benefits:

“We initially rolled out the Clarilis platform in the employment team. We found the whole experience with the team at Clarilis fantastic, right from the beginning. The implementation was seamless and exactly as promised. We’ve been delighted with how easy the software is to use, set up, configure, and update.”

Interest in the platform has grown and Mills & Reeve have now rolled it out to three other departments, with more in the pipeline.

In summing up the benefits, Emma concluded:

“Using the Clarilis platform allows us to be more productive as we are spending far less time preparing and producing first drafts of documents. Our lawyers’ time can be put to better use. The platform also helps to standardise best practice and improves the delegation of work to more junior lawyers, meaning that supervision is easier.

“I love working with the team at Clarilis and have developed a great working relationship with everyone I have encountered. I would happily recommend them to anyone looking for an automation solution and indeed have done so in the past.”