For a number of years, independent IT industry analysts have promoted the view that business process management (BPM) can make a significant positive impact on the running of corporate organizations.  This perspective is now gaining substantial support from within the global legal community.  So what is driving the adoption of BPM technology, which business processes are most suited and how can a successful BPM deployment deliver real value to your business?

As organizations make a fundamental shift toward adopting a business process focus, the level of interest in BPM has grown rapidly in recent years in both public and commercial sectors, particularly in the professional services arena.

There are three closely-related business pressures fueling the adoption of BPM.  The first is legislative compliance.  The second is increased competition driving the need to improve service quality while reducing costs and the third is the impact of major technological change resulting in the adoption of "best of breed systems."

Ensuring Compliance Through BPM
Compliance issues are becoming increasingly important to all businesses.  Many analysts now believe that if a business implements the right BPM solution, most of the organization's compliance issues can be met.  Processes where compliance plays a major part are therefore being considered high priority for BPM treatment.

According to Ian Beck, IT Director at U.K. law firm Tods Murray, "The most visible BPM opportunity for a legal firm is without question client/matter inception.  This process is not simply focused on assisting the fee earner in completing money laundering, conflicts or client engagement letters, but extends the process reach to the many other silos of information such as CRM, DMS, Case and HR systems, to name but a few."

Beck's opinion that client/matter inception is a prime target for BPM is supported by practical evidence of the priorities that legal sector clients typically set for deployment of BPM solutions.  Alongside other administrative procedures such as check requests, new client/matter inception is indeed a current "hot spot" among medium and large firms internationally.

New Client/Matters at Mishcon de Reya
London-based law firm Mishcon de Reya, for example, focused its initial BPM deployment on this process.  The firm's implementation included a number of key areas: integration of applications and management of procedures that included credit checking, conflict of interest checking, letters of engagement production and approval processes based on values and data.

Peter Wonson, IT Director at Mishcon de Reya, says:  "Improving adherence to best practice processes and increasing the quality of data collected as part of a new client or matter inception is a logical place to start with BPM.  It is, after all, the initial process that all others flow from and if not managed correctly can cause problems throughout many stages of the entire client interaction.

"In medium to large law firms, multiple application environments are the norm and so they need the flexibility and reach of a BPM solution that can quickly bring together all of the elements of enterprise application integration, data modeling, rules management and user interface design within a single framework.

"This flexibility and reach, coupled with the adaptability and ease-of-use of Microsoft Visio-based process modeling capabilities, available with some BPM tools, allows rapid deployment and evolution of sophisticated solutions within one easy-to-use development environment.

"BPM also offers excellent opportunities for long-term development and management of core processes within law firms."

Check Request and Cash Receipt Processes
Check requests and cash receipts are also viewed as priority areas for BPM within the legal sector.  As with new client/matter inception, these processes involve compliance components across multiple business areas and require the management of system-to-system, human-to-human and human-to-system interactions.

In England and Wales, the automation and management of new client/matter, check request and cash receipt processes can positively impact a firm's success in becoming Lexcel accredited.  Lexcel is the Law Society's practice management quality mark, similar to ISO 9000.  Written specifically for the legal profession, it allows any type and size of practice to undergo independent assessment to certify that the Lexcel Practice Management Standards are being met.

Essentially, any business process where there is a requirement for multiple systems and departments to work together and adhere to deadlines as well as legislative or compliance requirements is ripe for BPM.  BPM will bring all of these elements together, enabling them to be managed from within a single framework.

The Clementi Review in the U.K.
The advent of the post-Clementi era, which has seen a wide-ranging review of the U.K. legal system, is fuelling interest in BPM among business decision makers.  It's not just the technologists.  Partners and managing partners are being forced to look for new ways to protect their competitive advantage in an increasingly liberalized market, where national and international brands like Tesco and the RAC now plan to offer packaged legal services.

It seems likely that High Street law firms will have more to fear from Clementi than larger corporate law firms, the most likely areas for new entrants to focus being high volume processes, such as residential property conveyancing and PI claims.  However, there are also implications for the medium and large firms that have departments focused on relatively low value, high volume processes.

It is often the case that large firms providing a full service offering for particular practice area (e.g., commercial property) are very profitable as a whole, but are forced to provide low margin or loss-making services within their portfolio in order to win and keep their clients.  In this instance, such firms can also benefit from deploying BPM to reduce the administrative overhead and increase the efficiency in these areas to minimize any impact on the bottom line.

BPM is therefore a proven way to drive up efficiency and reduce costs.  As such, it can deliver increased competitive advantage that could help ensure continued success in an increasingly competitive post-Clementi business climate.

BPM is about far more than just the quest for increasing productivity and profitability alone.  As described previously, risk management and pressure from clients for increased transparency are also major factors, as is our third business driver — major technology change.

Major Technology Change in Law Firms
Over the past five years, most medium to large firms have implemented a variety of new "best-of-breed" applications for practice management, customer relationship management, document management and other areas.  Firms have only loosely integrated these systems to date and are now realizing they need to do more in order to get the best out of significant IT investments and ensure business processes that cross these application boundaries can be managed successfully.  Rather than embedding process rules directly within practice management or other back-end systems, firms now realize that an independent BPM layer is required to manage tasks that are often related or part of the same business processes across multiple departments and systems.

It is crucial that there is one development environment specifically built to match the skills and needs of business analysts.  This environment enables applications to be built rapidly and customized — including processes, data, forms, integrations, documents and organizational structures — using graphical tools while code is created in the background to build the target application.

This approach allows law firms to eliminate the IT barriers that previously impeded the adoption of a true, end-to-end process focus within the business, enabling a level of business agility that previously would not have been possible.

Strengthening the Case for Using BPM
Improvements in simple internal business processes as a result of BPM deployment could themselves be cost-justified in terms of return on investment.  Even by cutting the time a process takes by only a few percent, when multiplied across the whole firm, the measured benefits would be significant.  For example, efficiency savings of up to 50 percent have been reported by some legal firms as a result of successful BPM deployments.

But for many firms, the biggest business drivers for BPM are still managing risk and transparency of processes.  As the tide of firms adopting BPM continues to swell, making the business case for BPM can only get easier.

About our author . . .

Russell Wood is VP of Sales at FloSuite, a global BPM supplier focused on the professional services marketplace.  He has been working in the legal industry for the last decade primarily with case and business process management technologies.  He can be reached at russell.wood@flosuite.com.