Spotlight on Alternative Resourcing – a Q&A with Keiran Meiklejohn, Angus Rance and Rosie Stanger

In this article, Spotlight on Alternative Resourcing, we speak to Keiran Meiklejohn, Legal Analyst Manager and Associates Angus Rance and Rosie Stanger about how they collaborate and work alongside one another to provide our clients with seamless delivery of legal services. 

Keiran, you've been with Ashurst Advance for 6 years - can you give us a bit of background on how you came to find yourself in this role?

Keiran: I studied law at university and spent some time in other industries before starting with Ashurst in 2015. I started as a Legal Analyst before taking up my current role as Legal Analyst Manager in 2016. The Legal Analyst role appealed to me as it allowed me to keep that link to law but also to be part of a new approach to the delivery of services.

Angus, Rosie - can you tell us a little about your role, how long you've been with Ashurst and give us a brief overview of your experience working with the legal analyst team?

Rosie: I joined Ashurst as a trainee in September 2018 and qualified two years later into the Dispute Resolution team. Since then I have worked closely with the legal analyst team in Glasgow on a large litigation matter as well as a major investigation.

Angus: I am an Associate in our Dispute Resolution team in London, within our broader strategic advisory division. I trained at Ashurst and have worked with the legal analyst team on various instructions on two large commercial litigation matters.

Legal Analysts are still relatively new roles in the legal industry. How have you witnessed this role develop and how do you think this will affect the legal industry more widely in the future?

Keiran: The role of a Legal Analyst is constantly evolving. By its nature, the role is able to adapt and respond to the needs of our clients. One of the key developments I have noticed in the role over a number of years is the significant expertise we have built in the team. As an example, the team have recently been involved in the end to end process of delivering loans under the UK Government's Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme. This project has been the culmination of several years of development and expertise building. We are now at a stage where the capabilities of the team are recognised as being integral to how we deliver our services to clients. The main driver of the development of the legal analyst team has always been ensuring Ashurst aligns the right tasks with the right resource. I think this will continue to be an important factor in how the role continues to develop – in fact, now that Legal Analysts and other similar roles are more established in the market place, it is inevitable that more tasks will be considered 'right' for them. The cost efficiency challenge is not new to the legal industry and a reasonable prediction is that it will only get tougher with clients feeling more empowered in pushing their advisors to deliver services at a lower cost. The Legal Analysts, alongside technology and a process focus, will continue to be integral to helping our clients meet these challenges without hindering quality of output.

Prior to working with the legal analyst team, did you have any preconceptions as to how engaging them on a matter might work? Do you feel your views were correct, or has your attitude changed as a result of working with Keiran and the legal analyst team?

Rosie: I think I've always been of the view that the legal analyst team is, above all, there to help us work efficiently for our clients and to ensure everything gets done to a high standard and in accordance with deadlines. Any busy trainee or associate would be mad to turn that help down. The ability of the legal analyst team to scale-up and adapt rapidly as a matter develops is particularly impressive – it is much harder to find additional trainees and associates at very short notice, so the Legal Analysts offer great flexibility during particular pinch points. What I suppose has been a surprise is how closely it is possible to work with teams in different locations, which seemed more difficult a couple of years ago. Now we have all been through the experience of full-time virtual/home working due to various lockdowns and restrictions this year, it is less surprising, as we are all working remotely but collaboratively as a matter of course.

Angus: When I joined the firm, the concept of a Legal Analyst was fairly new and there was definitely a misconception that it was simply a marketing tool used on matters where the client had a particular concern about costs. Since working with the team, and in particular in our disputes practice, the Legal Analysts have become integral to the way we deliver certain projects and I can't imagine undertaking a matter without them. Generally I think there was also a misconception that Legal Analysts can only be involved in document review. We have found recently that the team are a really good resource for matter management tasks on larger cases or in assisting us to work more effectively and efficiently with the court and counsel through the preparation of documents. The team have proved to be very innovative and flexible which has been great.

Angus, Rosie, you have worked with the legal analyst team on multiple matters. Can you tell us a little bit more about these matters, how you approached working on this together and how this differs from traditional matter management?

Rosie: The first major matter I worked on with Legal Analysts was a fairly traditional litigation matter. We were defending a client against a significant claim and needed to provide disclosure to the other side of all relevant, disclosable documents. The Legal Analysts (assisted by our artificial intelligence software) helped us work through the universe of hundreds of thousands of potentially relevant documents, and locate and refine the disclosable population. The Legal Analysts then also helped us to review and get to grips with the other side's documents when we exchanged disclosure.

The second matter that has kept us busy for most of this year is an investigation. On this matter, the document review exercise was not for the purposes of disclosure according the Court requirements but for writing a report, so the Legal Analysts have become very skilled at assessing not just what is relevant to the issues at hand, but what might be particularly significant or useful by way of evidence in writing the report. It also meant that when we had finished the document review phase, the Legal Analysts had a really deep understanding of the evidence and key conclusions of the report, and so could help with lots of follow on tasks in finalising the investigation report.

Angus: Both the matters I've worked with the Legal Analysts on are commercial or financial litigation matters.

On the first matter, our initial instruction was during my time as a trainee and we instructed the legal analyst team at the document review and disclosure stage, which you would certainly call the more "traditional" approach. However, very quickly this instruction developed into a Legal Analyst becoming an important and integrated member of the team and assisting with a number of tasks across the matter.

This is certainly something that we have picked up on and took into consideration on the next matter, where we have a dedicated Legal Analyst for matter management and really value that retained knowledge that we are building up. We've already seen the benefit of that in how we interact with our team of barristers.

What have you found to be the main benefits of engaging the legal analyst team on client matters?

Rosie: The legal analyst team is able to work extremely efficiently and quickly alongside other fee-earners, freeing us up to focus on other tasks and workstreams. On a busy litigation or investigation matter, it really would be hard to imagine not involving Legal Analysts from an early stage.

Angus: As the role of a Legal Analyst is a long term alternative career path, we have really valued the retained knowledge and continuity that you can build up within Legal Analysts. The team obviously bring cost and time efficiencies which were the original drivers of the Legal Analyst model, but the retained knowledge and understanding that the Senior Legal Analysts have from working on a case for a longer period of time is an unexpected but vital bonus.

Our legal analyst team work directly alongside our legal teams on client matters. Can you tell us a little bit about how this works in practice and how you manage to integrate the Legal Analysts as an extension to the legal team?

Keiran: The approach to this can vary slightly from matter to matter but as a general rule, the Legal Analysts are there to provide either ongoing support on recurring activity for clients or to contribute to specific needs for resource. In the context of a Disputes matter, the Legal Analysts might get involved in the early stages, scale up to carry out more voluminous tasks such as document review and then scale back down to continue to provide ongoing support with, for example, evidence preparation for witnesses and experts.

Rosie: In practice, the Legal Analysts are as much a part of the team as any other fee-earners, and in my experience, the client is always well aware of the workstreams that are being managed solely or predominantly by the legal analyst team. Though it has traditionally been more difficult for Legal Analysts to be involved in client meetings due to geography, I'm sure this will change over time as we all become more accustomed to virtual meetings.

Angus: On my matters, we have found that morning or daily calls with the Legal Analysts and the legal team have made a real difference. This ensures that both teams get to know each other and get comfortable discussing the issues surrounding a particular matter. The calls don't have to be long and generally we will try and let the Legal Analysts lead the agenda so that they are comfortable raising topics - often presenting issues to the legal team for solutions or comments.

In current times, those calls have become even more important as we can't be face-to-face at all. That's also helped integration as everyone (well most of us!) have been working away from the office. I say most of us only because more recently I've also been working with Legal Analysts based in our Brisbane office who have been able to go back into the office. It's meant some early mornings for those calls but has been a great addition to the capability of the legal analyst team.

What tasks did the legal analyst team undertake on your matter that would have otherwise have been completed by the legal team?

Rosie: All sorts! Document review (including privilege and confidentiality reviews), analysis of interview transcripts, summarising documents, verification of sources referred to in a report and forensic document searches.

Angus: There's too many to list. Monitoring and collating correspondence, assistance with bundles, summarising documents, initial reviews of data, responding to standardised requests. I'm pleased that we continue to find more ways to get the Legal Analysts involved.

In your opinion, what are the 3 most important factors that enable internal teams to effectively collaborate on a matter?

Keiran:

1. Make sure everyone is clear on the big picture. As much as that sounds like a cliché, if you have everyone working in silos without a clear direction or understanding of where their work fits in to the wider picture then you'll struggle to collaborate effectively.
2. Be open to different ideas. Collaboration becomes difficult if there is resistance to new ways of working. This is an area where the relationship between Alternative Resourcing and Disputes is particularly strong with both sides being generally open minded to approaching tasks differently.
3. Communicate. This is a bit of a 'what it says on the tin' factor but it is key. Put simply, how can you work together well if you don't have open and regular communication?

Rosie:

1. Get the briefing right – think carefully about what different members of the team need to know to perform at a high level from the outset. It is often worth spending a little bit more time on the briefing than you might expect, to save time down the line.
2. Use the technology available to efficiently work through queries/changes in a way that is easy to record and audit.
3. Communicate often!

Angus:

1. Communication. It is essential to have good lines of communication to and from both teams. For the legal team, this means being available for those ad-hoc calls or queries Legal Analysts might have.
2. Establishing a good relationship or understanding straightaway. This is probably best done through a face to face briefing (if possible). If not, then through video calls.
3. Recording instructions and actions to make sure they have been understood and executed (and can be explained again later if needed!). The Senior Legal Analysts are really good at this and carry a lot of the reporting burden.