Insights from the Thomson Reuters Legal Geek Takeover: Maximizing Productivity with HighQ
Thomson Reuters recently hosted a Legal Geek takeover, a half day of virtual sessions on legal innovation, technology and trends. A highlight of the event was the Maximizing the Productivity of Your Legal Workflow session hosted by Tom MacDonald, product manager for Thomson Reuters HighQ, and Mark Reynolds, lead consultant for Thomson Reuters Legal Professionals Europe.
Their session explored how innovative law firms are combining technology, process improvement and a client-focused approach to improve their legal service delivery. Legal Current had an opportunity to catch up with MacDonald and Reynolds after the Legal Geek Takeover, and they shared insights from their session. Below is a recap of the conversation.
Legal Current: Describe what HighQ does and why it’s useful for law firms as well as corporate law departments.
MacDonald: HighQ is a no-code solution that enables your business to collaborate. It’s built for the practice of law, and it connects your firm to one another, to your clients and to other stakeholders. It provides transparency so everyone can see the latest documents and data for the work in progress – enabling users to improve collaboration and engagement, increase productivity and efficiency, and streamline project and matter management.
Reynolds: HighQ allows you to connect the different systems required to do legal work, aggregating all of that in one place. It supports many different use cases for law firms and corporate legal teams – from legal project management, litigation and transaction management to legal intake, self-service and matter management. It’s adopted across pretty much all areas of legal practice, and there are loads of opportunities for you to develop your own solutions for these use cases using the no-code configurations of the platform.
LC: Specifically, how does HighQ support legal professionals’ workflows?
MacDonald: Workflow is simply the prescription of how things are done. In a legal context, it’s anything from deciding how you deal with a particular document type to managing escalations. Workflows include how to handle legal intake, closing checklists, purchasing a property and anything else that can be described in a process.
One key problem with workflow implementation through software is the requirement to change behaviors to make it work. The unique configurability of the HighQ platform allows you to create your environments and your workflows organically.
Reynolds: Our automation rule builder connects these elements of HighQ, which together are greater than the sum of their parts. Our “if this, then that” style of rules gives you the flexibility to quickly build, test and improve your workflows. This approach enables you to multiply activity with no extra effort from your day-to-day users. The rule builder is necessarily simple, and in the spirit of a no-code solution, you don’t need to be a developer to understand it.
LC: How can HighQ help legal professionals take advantage of the trends we’re seeing such as increased adoption of advanced technologies and a greater acceptance of working remotely?
MacDonald: We know from the data that law firms are driving revenue growth by deploying more lawyers and not increasing efficiency. We also know that new entrants to the legal services market are starting to talk a different language than that of a traditional law firm. Phrases such as “unit cost” and “unit price” are starting to enter the conversation, and breaking up a legal process into component parts helps people understand how that can be delivered much more efficiently. HighQ is one of the tools being used by those exact people to deliver services that clients have long requested.
Reynolds: The secret sauce for good workflow management on HighQ is understanding your business processes, balancing that with your client’s needs along with having a good understanding of your technology and being prepared to invest time in designing, building and testing workflows to reap the rewards of the efficiencies later.
Learn more about how HighQ, which recently introduced its latest version, can strengthen legal operations and firm workflows. Also, watch Legal Current for additional Legal Geek Takeover session highlights, and read more session insights on Thomson Reuters Institute.
