DLA Piper has successfully completed an entire US back office administration and support restructure using task delegation and workflow tool BigHand Now, which has been rolled out to over 2,000 users across all 28 of DLA’s North American offices.
In the early stages of the restructure and prior to selecting BigHand Now, DLA says it developed a shared resource model to replace the traditional one-to-one relationship between attorneys and legal secretaries. The new multi-level teams were intended to not only be more efficient in supporting multiple attorneys at a time, but more cost effective.
Initially, the new model was supported by an internally developed tool, but the global giant says it quickly became apparent that the tool lacked the visibility required to facilitate effective task delegation across teams and to ensure the right tasks were going to the right level of resource at all times. Sonji Le Blanc, senior project manager at DLA Piper says, “To enable staff to delegate tasks to appropriately skilled resources, DLA required an easy to use and more robust solution – a fluid, highly visual tool for users and one that provided management with a single view of all tasks at once on a dashboard.”
DLA Piper implemented BigHand Now to facilitate the effective capture, delegation and reporting of legal tasks throughout the business. Following swift user adoption, DLA now reports over 8,000 tasks being sent through the BigHand Now system each month by over 1,000 daily users, with the proportion of work being carried out by lower level staff having more than doubled within six months. Moreover, as the roll-out of BigHand Now expands, both internally and across the wider business, this is expected to increase further.
For attorneys, BigHand Now has enabled effective task management and better communication across the business, which has increased turnaround times both internally and externally. For support staff, BigHand Now has presented a new and unique opportunity to collaborate; from entering tasks on behalf of an attorney and effectively delegating work to another resource team, to being able to actively choose which tasks they’d prefer to undertake. Le Blanc explains, “Growing numbers of firms are moving towards this collaborative approach and they want to know what we’re achieving with BigHand Now. The ability to share work across teams and across offices is fundamental to the way we are able to retain, grow and deliver better job satisfaction, not to mention providing better service more economically over longer hours of the day for our attorneys.”
This is a huge win for BigHand and Norma Spearman, chief legal support officer at DLA Piper comments, “The bi-product has been cost reduction achieved as a result of allocating more tasks to lower level, lower cost resources and the ability to proactively manage staff to improve their skill sets and enhance job satisfaction. BigHand Now has unlocked an ongoing project that will continuously deliver ongoing benefits.”
For more details on DLA’s back office restructure and the results achieved with BigHand Now, visit https://bit.ly/2EvitCf