Spotlight on legal process improvement

At Ashurst Advance, we have an established legal process improvement team who are experts in making legal service delivery more efficient. They offer our clients a framework and toolkit to enhance productivity and optimise performance through process engineering and design. The team work alongside our lawyers to offer our clients legal excellence with efficient delivery. 

In this series, Spotlight on legal process improvement, we speak to members of both our legal process improvement team and our legal teams about how they collaborate and work alongside one another to provide our clients with seamless delivery of legal services.

Today, we hear from Abilash Unny, Senior Legal Process Improvement Manager and Andrea Thomas, Senior Associate, Global Loans who have worked together on a matter to help a client with setting up a new start-up bank which aims to promote regional economic development and provide competitive rates to its clients. The initial focus of this bank was to issue property based commercial loans to regional businesses.

Abilash you've been with Ashurst Advance for more than two years - can you give us a bit of background on how you came to find yourself in this role?

Abilash: I have worked in the legal industry for most of my career. I started in a legal operations role for around 5 to 6 years where I had the opportunity to be part of a large transformation programme. This was a massive learning curve for me which inspired me to expand my knowledge of legal process improvement. After leading a number of unique project successes, ranging from legal process remediation to implementation of target operating models, and directing a culture of continuous improvement, I decided to join Ashurst to continue to build out our legal process improvement capabilities to increase efficiency both internally and for our clients.

Andrea you've been with Ashurst for 9 years - can you tell us a little about your role and a brief overview of your experience working with the legal process improvement team?

Andrea: I am a senior associate in the Global Loans team in London and I came to work with the legal process improvement team on a large project for a start-up bank. It was my first experience with the legal process improvement team and I quickly realised how beneficial they are to a project of that scale.

Legal process improvement is still a relatively new offering in the legal industry. How have you witnessed this capability develop recently and how do you think legal process improvement will affect the legal industry more widely in the future?

Abilash: Legal process improvement is an emerging discipline and has only started to feature as a hot topic within the legal industry in the last few years. It is a common practice in many law firms to associate legal process improvement solely with an internal transformation programme but at Ashurst, we have a multifaceted approach including working closely with Ashurst clients to help them improve their internal legal processes. For example we recently assisted a major global bank in defining a process to capture Legal Management Information (MI) for their inhouse legal function. We also work as part of Ashurst matter teams on client instructions, often involved from the initial pitch stage through to the completion of the matter. We help design the process framework around legal service delivery, and refine the service delivery design throughout the matter lifecycle.

In terms of how legal process improvement may evolve in the future, given the economic uncertainty we are currently facing I would expect to see an increase in law firms and inhouse legal teams kick-starting various legal process improvement or general legal transformation initiatives as pressure to reduce legal fees increases. Some firms will use this crisis as a catalyst to drive positive long term improvements and enhance employee and client experience.

Prior to working with a legal process improvement manager, did you have any preconceptions as to how deploying legal process improvement on a matter might work? Do you feel your views were correct, or has your attitude changed as a result of working with Abilash Unny?

Andrea: At first I wasn't sure what to expect and therefore didn't have any preconceptions on how deploying legal process improvement on my matter would work. I was interested to learn and I very quickly saw the value the team added. I honestly don't know how I would have coped on the project without the legal process improvement team! I now know how useful it is to have the legal process improvement team working alongside me on a project. Abilash and I came at the project from different angles and by communicating and working together we were able to deliver to the client a high quality product and process.

Abilash and Andrea, you have both worked together on helping a start-up banking client with setting up & issuing property based commercial loans to regional businesses. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you approached this matter together and how this differs from traditional matter management?

Abilash: The matter partner reached out to Ashurst Advance for help at the start of this project which allowed us to contribute to enhancing our client's experience from the outset. The legal process improvement team was considered a part of the matter team which meant we participated in all client meetings including the client requirement gathering sessions. Once we completed the scoping of this project, we designed a legal service delivery model by completing multiple workshops with the client and our legal team in a collaborative service design exercise. In my view, this project is a good example of how Ashurst and our clients can collaborate to solve a problem.

Andrea: The legal process improvement team was completely integrated within the wider project team and became involved from the start. This helped us deliver a seamless experience to the client as did regular contact between the legal team and the legal process improvement team. The legal process improvement team also helped to educate me on the different ways they could contribute to the client experience and process. It was also great to see the client's positive reaction to how the legal process improvement team really understood their business and were able to help.

The sheer size and complexity of this project – with extensive and detailed mapping of the process which was being developed for transactions between the various parties (being, different functions within the bank, Ashurst teams, the borrower and the borrower's solicitors) – meant that the legal process improvement team's contribution was essential. The mapping of the service delivery process – which is well outside my area of expertise and skillset – required someone with Abilash's background and level of experience. His contribution also allowed me to focus on the core legal work, which was a beneficial to the delivery of the project to the client.

What were the main benefits of deploying legal process improvement discipline on this matter?

Abilash: We have achieved many benefits by deploying the legal process improvement team on this matter but I would like to focus on the two most important ones. Deploying the legal process improvement team on this matter has helped us collaboratively design a bespoke service for our client which in turn, helped our clients achieve a better legal process and service delivery model transparency. The second benefit relates to taking large, complex problems and breaking them down into sizable chunks in a structured manner to find an efficient and effective solution, without compromising the quality of our legal service delivery. This is exactly what we did on this matter by teaming up with the talented legal team.