International law firm takes client service to next level with Atlas

Key Results

Information is easily findable

Ongoing improvements in business functionality

Reduction in technology overhead

The leading law firm

The firm serves a wide range of sectors with a focus on finance/insurance, health & care and real estate. Recognized for its commitment to client service, the firm delivers customized solutions to its clients by combining an innovative use of technology with its excellent legal skills and expertise.

The project involved replacing the existing platform for external client collaboration and to support the transition to and migration of client-facing sites to the new solution. This had to be done at pace to meet specific compliance deadlines.

The goal of the project was to improve collaboration with clients to support key business processes, including:

Client workspaces for sharing information and accessing engagements.
Transaction / deal rooms for plot sales, real estate, and corporate merger and acquisitions engagements.
Data rooms to share documents with clients.
Knowledge areas to share information with multiple clients.
Ease-of-use so all parties are quickly able to use it successfully.

Challenge

The firm was looking to reduce its reliance on legacy systems and increase its use of Microsoft 365 to drive a higher return on investment.

Their existing client portal was a mix of legacy SharePoint an established legacy product in the legal sector that had to be managed and administered by members of practice areas separately from the rest of the firm’s IT estate. This made it difficult to understand the true cost of the service versus the value it provided. A lack of data governance also meant its internal and external use led to information being siloed within it.

Solution

The firm selected Atlas as a future-proof and scalable solution. It is deployed as an evergreen cloud digital workplace within the companies own Microsoft 365 cloud tenancy, giving complete control over the platform’s security, administration, and compliance.

The solution includes:

Line-of-business workspace templates that provide consistency and can be quickly and automatically provisioned for new client engagements.
Consistent folder structures and automated tagging configuration for different engagement types.
An intuitive and accessible search that is permission-trimmed, so clients can only see what they have access to.
Automatic content tagging to improve knowledge productivity, information findability and security labelling.
Feature parity – plus additional functionality – in relation to the legacy client collaboration solution.
Native integration with the firms own Microsoft 365 authentication platform, allowing full control of internal and external user credentials and client on/off-boarding processes.

Implementation

The project team ran the old and new systems in parallel for a period to minimize any potential disruption to clients, and released workspaces incrementally to be able to address any potential issues quickly.

ClearPeople provided expertise and guidance on how best to deliver the overall solution using Atlas, with Microsoft 365 as the foundation. As such, the firm was able to complete most migration tasks using Atlas’s self-service capabilities.

Results

Atlas has enabled the firm to consolidate their technology landscape and reduce technology overhead. Atlas leverages the incumbent Microsoft 365 investment and replaces a legacy client collaboration platform.
Information is now easily findable within the new client workspaces as well as across the transactional and informational portals.
The use of templated workspaces with easy and customizable ‘pick and mix’ features reduces provisioning time for new workspaces to a minimum, while increasing consistency and improving the end-user experience.
Quarterly product improvements are provided by ClearPeople, ensuring Atlas is continuously evolving and supporting the firm.

The future

Next on the roadmap is an intranet refresh, followed by the provision of knowledge management services to surface information held in the incumbent document management system and other sources in one place. The ultimate goal is to provide the firms staff and clients with a truly consolidated digital workplace experience.

“I was concerned that the new extranet would be difficult to learn and get up to speed with quickly. Considering the number of client engagements we manage, time is of the essence, so I was pleasantly surprised how easy Atlas is to work with, both for our people and our clients.”
"The previous client portal solution was managed outside the main IT processes, meaning visibility over access and auditing was done separately. Now IT can manage it all efficiently from one place."
"Atlas gives me the flexibility to easily add and change features to workspaces as needed. The automated tagging of content using the smart settings applied on the workspace and the preconfigured folders makes finding information in and across transactions much easier."