Barker Booth & Eastwood, a long established firm of solicitors based in the North West, has chosen TikitTFB as their official solutions partner to replace their existing IRIS AIM Evolution Accounts system and introduce a comprehensive case and document management system firm-wide.

The 50 user system will be deployed in phases with the accounts and desktop components scheduled to go-live during September. The second phase will concentrate on developing the case management system including the creation of caseflows for their Personal Injury and Conveyancing departments, and is expected to be completed before the end of the year.

The firm had been using AIM for a number of years with many of the precedents and processes unchanged since it was first instated. Tracy Kirkland and Sue Pilkington, Practice and Accounts Manager respectively, felt there was a need to move the firm forward and provide an improved way of working. Following a visit to the 2010 Legal IT show, they reviewed the upgrade path being offered by IRIS as well as a number of other vendors including Eclipse and Linetime before selecting TikitTFB and Partner for Windows as their preferred choice.

Anne Morley, Matrimonial Partner at the firm comments, “This kind of investment requires a great deal of trust in your chosen supplier and confidence that the system is going to deliver as promised.

“We see Partner for Windows and our relationship with TikitTFB as a long term commitment and we look forward to working with them to develop an advanced system that will allow us to improve the way in which we operate and manage processes on a day-to-day basis, compete more effectively in the market place, and most importantly provide a higher level of customer service to our clients.”

Partner for Windows will provide the firm with a fully-flexible and comprehensive solution that can be used across all their practice areas including Personal Injury, Conveyancing, Employment, Family Law, Commercial Property, Wills & Probate, and Civil Litigation. As Partner for Windows is fully-compliant with LSC requirements, the firm will be able to manage their Civil LSC contracts more profitably utilising functionality such as SMP reconciliation, and bulk export to the LSC website. The firm have also chosen to implement PartnerMail, an intelligent email management tool that helps to file emails to and from your inbox to the relevant case file in Partner for Windows, and the SMS module, which will allow them to communicate with clients and third parties quickly and discretely via text message.

Heavyweight personal injury claims law firm, Minster Law, has announced successful Application-to-Application (A2A) integration with the Ministry of Justice's (MoJ's) new RTA (Road Traffic Accident) claims process Portal.

Minster Law handles over 50,000 injury claims every year, and processes over 10% of all RTA injury claims in England and Wales.  A long-time user of Eclipse's Proclaim Case Management Software solution, the practice has been supported by Eclipse in the implementation of A2A integration and is now successfully submitting volume claims.

A2A integration gives Minster Law the ability to submit claims directly from Proclaim Case Management to the Portal.  The alternative for law firms is to use the manual 'web browser' interface (developed by the MoJ's technical partners), which has come under much criticism for its inability to deal with high volumes of throughput.

Minster Law has over 300 Proclaim users, and was prepared for the new RTA process on 'day 1'.  The practice was the very first to successfully submit a CNF (Claims Notification Form) via A2A.  CIO, Neil Boddy, lead the A2A project and comments on the importance of integration:

"For a practice of our profile, it is incredibly important that we move quickly to take advantage whenever legislative changes like this occur.  Given the volume of RTA cases we process, using the 'web browser' method of accessing the Portal was simply never an option, and A2A integration was critical.

"We have worked closely with Eclipse to develop an effective A2A solution and despite the many (and well publicised) external setbacks, we are now in a position that gives us great competitive advantage and confidence to continue high volume operations.  After a period of early adoption and cautious monitoring, we are delighted to indicate that our A2A system is working very well indeed.  Our use of Proclaim is vital in maintaining our position as a top-tier claimant PI firm."

It is fair to say that The Uk government does not have a pain free record of implementing successful IT projects and one of the latest ones, the Road Traffic Accident Insurance claims Portal is no exception.

The idea behind the Portal is that it will significantly speed up the processing and payment of low cost claims by digitising and streamlining communications between Claimant lawyers, insurers and compensators  leading to all claims being resolved with the new time limit of fifteen days, instead of the previous sixty to ninety days.

However, the implementation of the portal was so rushed that the data interface specifications were still in a state of flux when it went live on the 30^th of April and this led to the suspension of  new registrations for several day as soon as it went live to sort out the mess. Even when operational again, users discovered that the manual data entry through the data collection screen was a very laborious and error prone problem, taking an average of  30 minutes per claim and processing errors in the portal have been discovered by around fifty organisations. Such was the degree of unhappiness of the user community that they formed their own 'protest group' on the leading business networking Linkedin'. A typical comment from a disgruntled user commented that the development of the portal was ‘like the blind leading the blind’ and 'The portal people have been fobbing us off forever, saying it’s all in hand’.

Leading independent solutions provider Zylpha, who specialise in providing integration, connectivity and security  solutions for Case Management systems, had the foresight to predict the need to develop a direct web based integration solution that extracts and updates the required information from an underlying Case Management system such as SolCase or Visualfiles and were  flexible and responsive enough to maintain alignment with the shifting  interface  specifications throughout the early 'switch on' period.

As a direct result, Zylpha is now the leading independent provider of connectivity solutions to the Portal and at the time of writing has nine organisations using it's Rapid RTA solution. Zylpha's users have now processed many hundreds of claims through the Portal and Paul Hinchliffe, Practice Manager and co-founder at Bott & Co commented;  

New Quadrant Partners LLP (New Quadrant), a newly formed private client boutique based in London, has gone live just two months after ordering a new case and practice management system from TikitTFB. The firm, led by Louise Stoten, formerly of Payne Hicks Beach – will employ Partner for Windows to help manage business processes, drive growth and support the delivery of services in tax and trust advice, wealth structuring, succession planning, trust management, and family office consulting and administration.

The project was managed for New Quadrant by Pragmatise Limited, an independent IT consultancy which has been involved in IT projects for organisations such as Ernst & Young, and most recently establishing all IT-related services, including the successful implementation of Partner for Windows, for Maurice Turnor Gardner LLP, the private client de-merger of top five law firm Allen & Overy.

Joan Major, CEO of New Quadrant comments, ‘As a new start-up it is extremely important that we choose reliable systems that will assist us in developing our position in the market by giving clear visibility of our performance across all areas of the business. Partner for Windows offers us functionality and flexibility allowing us to develop a solution in line with our requirements and one that will adapt with us as the firm grows.

‘TikitTFB have demonstrated that they are a willing partner to help us get the system where it needs to be now and in the future, and we look forward to working with them to achieve this’.

New Quadrant Partners LLP have also chosen sister company TikitNIS to handle their infrastructure and hardware requirements, meaning both hardware and software will be looked after by the Tikit Group.

Walsall based firm Enoch Evans selected Pilgrim LawSoft as their next generation Practice & Case Management system in February 2010. The project began in earnest in March and the firm went live in June, having successfully migrated from their legacy Miles33 and SolCase systems in tandem.

Pilgrim and Enoch Evans project personnel worked in unison to ensure data conversion, consultancy and training were all completed in line with the projected go live date. The firm was able to take advantage of the comprehensive case management applications supplied by Pilgrim allowing the project team to focus on ensuring the overall system reflected the firm’s working practices. Implementation training and familiarisation support was given to all users within the firm.

The firm’s Managing Partner David Evans said, “The firm was committed to achieving a short turnaround period for the project. My team worked diligently alongside Pilgrim to ensure a smooth transition from systems that had been in use for over twenty years. I and the rest of the partnership are happy with how the project went and the firm is now starting to enjoy the benefits of using the sophisticated tools LawSoft provides, all supported by a single database.”

Colin Kennedy Pilgrim’s COO said, “David and his team were excellent to work with. Any firm embarking on a new system implementation would benefit from taking a leaf out of Enoch Evans’ book. Common sense, quick decision making and a ‘can do’ attitude were the key ingredients for this exemplary project.”

TikitTFB in partnership with Workshare, are pleased to announce Document Compare Live – a new Software as a Service for Document Comparison based on Workshare Compare Server technology. The service will be initially available to Partner for Windows users’ towards the end of July 2010. Document Compare Live is designed to deliver a more cost-effective and accessible document comparison service, allowing firms of any size to benefit from Workshare’s powerful comparison capabilities.

Currently, client firms can only take advantage of Workshare’s Document Comparison by implementing server-based or per user solutions. Document Compare Live will enable all 600 of TikitTFB’s clients in the UK, to quickly and easily compare Microsoft Word or PDF documents anytime and anywhere.

TikitTFB will be leading the development of the project. The initial release will provide a comparison interface linked from their existing Client Portal to a hosted version of Workshare Compare Server, based at their secure data centre in Fareham. Using their existing usernames and passwords, users will be able to fully utilise the service online without having to install any software on their servers or user desktops. Each client firm will have an account automatically set up with enough credits to run five free comparisons so they can evaluate the service. Subsequent usage will be charged on a per comparison basis and will be invoiced monthly in arrears. The subsequent release will see the service integrated within Partner for Windows, allowing clients to launch Document Compare Live directly from the caseflow they are working on, run the comparison and file the results back into the caseflow.

Adrian Jones, Product and Development Director at TikitTFB comments, ‘This project marks an exciting period for TikitTFB; we are making technology, that has to date been unattainable to some users, attainable, by eliminating barriers such as cost or insufficient resources to host software, via the SaaS platform. Our entire client base will be able to take advantage of this service without the need to deploy any software or upfront cost. We believe this service has great potential and could shape the way in which we, as a solution provider, deliver our solutions and services in the future.’

Frank Boening, VP EMEA at Workshare believes Compare is a perfect service for the cloud. ‘Many lawyers need Comparison but not all of them all the time. Document Compare Live, with its pay as you go model, puts the control and decision making back to the lawyers. It frees up IT from managing a desktop application but still ensures the same comparison technology used by a magic circle firm is available for a one off comparison at a very reasonable cost.’