Associate editor Caroline Hill reports… BT’s 400-lawyer legal team is midway through rolling out Tikit Group’s global practice and case management system Partner for Windows (P4W), following BT’s acquisition of Tikit in January 2013.
The telecom giant’s high profile legal team, which has long been a LexisNexis client, most recently of Lexis Visualfiles, brought around 300 registered users onto the new system at the end of March, with the remaining users to be added over the next quarter. While the initial rollout will focus on the UK legal teams, the system will be rolled out to all BT lawyers in around 20 jurisdictions globally.
According to BT’s COO & Director of Compliance Gareth Tipton, efficiencies from the new system are expected to see a five-to-10% per annum saving year-on-year over an initial three-year period. Tipton said: “With BT’s purchase of Tikit Group in January 2013, an opportunity arose for the BT legal community to introduce a global case management system offering wide capabilities and functionality in regard to case management, document control, time recording and management information recording unified under a single system allowing a set of defined deliverables meeting the needs of all the differing legal disciplines.”
The time recording function will be used as one way to measure the productivity and workflow of the legal team, as BT pushes to become ever more efficient, in line with stringent annual cost saving targets. BT cited key deliverables of P4W as its single source of information at client and matter level; integration with Microsoft Office; calendar integration (diary dates can be accessed in P4W and Microsoft Outlook); lock-down security at both case level and client level; and performance management, with business analysis of data and report outputs providing feature-rich reports to the BT legal leadership team.
Tipton said: “The replacement of the existing Visualfiles software will drive necessary efficiencies in working practices across the whole of the BT legal community, providing capacity to undertake increased work activity levels, while meeting ongoing resourcing challenges.”
BT, which first started using SolCase in 1998 and then converted to Visualfiles in 2008, has been a LexisNexis client for over 17 years. Andy Sparkes, general manager, LexisNexis Enterprise Solutions said: “This is a natural move for BT to make given that Tikit is now owned by the company. The saving to BT really comes from not paying the maintenance for Visualfiles as they will be using the company’s (Group IT) services and infrastructure. We were given notice by BT back in 2012 and we agreed that LexisNexis would continue supporting Visualfiles for six months, when the Tikit rollout was scheduled to complete. It looks like the project will have taken three years to actually conclude – as we are now committed to supporting Visualfiles until the beginning of 2016.”