We speak to CT&IO Stuart Whittle about the selection process and plans for Clio Operate
Weightmans has selected Clio Operate as its case and matter management platform, following a major selection process conducted over a 12-month period.
The circa 1500-people leading UK insurance law firm was previously a flagship Elite MatterSphere customer. Speaking to Legal IT Insider about the move to Clio Operate, chief technology and innovation officer Stuart Whittle explained that Elite had communicated to clients that 10.2 would be the final version, necessitating a move.
Weightmans has long been ahead of the curve in its use of case management and was looking for a system that can support the complexity of legal work across the entire organisation.
Whittle said that he long ago realised that legal work at its core has the same structure in terms of the likes of onboarding, drafting letters, making phone calls and time recording. “You might have a debt recovery matter with high workflow and low DMS, or an M&A with high DMS, but you still need workflow, even if it’s just matter inception,” he said.
He added that because Weightmans had decided 20 years ago that it needs one place to record data and has a data warehouse paired with its core systems, it is able to “slice and dice” that data and provide detailed insights to clients. It was important, therefore, to find a system that could extend that capability.
Weightmans worked with Lights-On Consulting on the selection process. Whittle says he first talked to “thirty or forty” case management vendors at ILTACON last year, before working with Peter Owen from Lights-On to come up with a pool of 15 to 20 contenders.
Whittle says: “They ranged from saying ‘Our sweet spot is 200-300 users’ to ‘We only work with US law firms.”
The final pool of four vendors saw deep dives into their functionality and Whittle says: “Clio Operate, or Sharedo, was a mile ahead.”
Weightmans particularly liked Operate’s solution accelerator packs, which are out of the box pre-configured frameworks tailored to common legal practice scenarios. Whittle says: “Sixty or seventy percent is out of the box.”
He also says that the Operate/Sharedo team understand the way that lawyers work, commenting, “It was like I was talking to myself. I didn’t need to explain why an M&A matter is different to personal injury.”
The other attraction is the ability to surface data from Clio’s research platform vLex at the point of need, with Whittle observing: “Many years ago I spoke with Edouard Tavernier, then at LexisNexis, and said wouldn’t it be great if you could surface all your content in the matter management system. Now you’ve got it, and the system can push all that content to me at the relevant point in time.”
We understand that there are some key announcements coming up from Operate, so watch this space.
