Transforming Paper-Heavy Legal Processes at Gordons LLP

Stephen Hunter, Head of IT, told us about how he’s found working with Arena to supply their copy and print and the benefits the firm has seen since implementing mstore for a digital mailroom solution.

About the Client

Gordons is a leading Yorkshire law firm with offices in Leeds and Bradford. Arena has been working in partnership with Gordons since 2017, working towards achieving their managed print services and paper light goals.

When Gordons came to review their copy and print provision, they decided to look at other suppliers and Arena came out on top for a variety of reasons, not least the opportunity to reduce paper and introduce efficiencies across the firm.“

We have similar working synergies with Arena, including working with charities to benefit local communities, but we already had our eye on mstore document automation projects and something to take us further down the line to achieve our paper light goals. Arena was better equipped and had a more mature solution to help us meet our objectives.”

mstore is Arena’s own document management software which is applied across a wide range of sectors to transform any heavily paper-based processes into more efficient and streamlined digital working. Legal firms are using mstore to speed up the process of distributing daily post to fee earners. Stephen put in his own words how mstore is used at Gordons.

Currently, mstore is being used by the Personal Injury and Residential Conveyancing specialists at their Bradford office as these departments receive the most post. After seeing the benefits of mstore, Gordons intend to roll out the solution firm wide.

“The main benefit is the fee earners get the post earlier than when they used to. As all the documents are filed into the system automatically and we don’t have the labour-intensive task of scanning physical post, getting the email and dragging it into the CMS, it’s already in there so it’s much more efficient. mstore has played a part in our paper light initiative as traditionally, there would be massive paper folders with piles of paper on peoples’ desk. From a disaster recovery point of view, as everything is now digital, if anything ever happened to the office we’ve now got an electronic copy of it, users have the ability to access their case files remotely without the need to physically be in the office.”

Making a fee earner’s time more efficient when managing administrative tasks is a significant benefit of implementing a digital mailroom.

Gordons have remote access software for their staff, meaning new incoming documents can now be accessed from anywhere. This makes remote working easier as hard copies are no longer waiting to be actioned in the office.

“As soon as the post hits the system and someone is logged on at home they can access their documents. We have a good remote access system, the user experience is the same as working in the office. mstore is filing the post straight into our case management system in electronic format and the relevant people are notified by email when it’s there.

Copy and Print Strategy

In addition to seeing new benefits from using mstore, Stephen has also been happy with their copy and print service as supplied by Arena.

“The install went very well. Overall, we didn’t have any major issues. There were a few minor issues involving our case management system, but these were swiftly dealt with. There was a lot of resource thrown at the project to ensure a smooth implementation, so I’ve no complaints.”

Arena’s service team regularly receive excellent feedback from customers, and this was no different for Gordons.

“The service team are very responsive, you generally get someone the same day. We phone them in the morning and they are there within a couple of hours so that’s working really well.”

Gordons are using PaperCut on their devices, print management software which helps to reduce print costs, provides in-depth reporting, improves security and enables follow-me print so that users can release their print from any device.

“PaperCut is a really good product. The follow-me print side of things is really good, it saves people queueing up at an MFD, so you can just pop on to another one which works well for us. We’ve definitely seen a reduction in paper too. There’s a number of initiatives we have of trying to reduce paper, so this helps, it’s definitely made a big difference for us.”

With PaperCut’s reporting feature Stephen can easily access management information and track how the firm is performing against their paper reduction targets.

“We monitor our paper usage with PaperCut and distribute reports to management teams. We have targets set to reduce our paper usage to a lower level, so I can now create a graph to monitor trends which is really useful.”

For a solution that manages documents which are vital to the daily requirements for the law firm, it’s important to be able to rely on the supplier and the service they provide.

“We are really happy with Arena, things are going well and we don’t have many problems with the solution. We have the occasional service issue with our devices, but that’s typical of something with moving parts. From an account management side, it’s also really good. We have quarterly reviews where we sit down and go through all the statistics and discuss how everything is going, so it’s working well.”