Posted on June 15, 2020 by Joseph Lamport
These are the basic design principles that have been incorporated into BigHand Now, a powerful software tool that streamlines law firm operations and optimizes the workflow between the front and back office. It is the easiest and most cost-effective way to make sure administrative work gets directed to the right person at the right time, so all a firm’s essential tasks get timely done. If Ray Kroc was running operations for a 21st century law firm instead of building his fast food empire, BigHand Now would be the key – or secret sauce -- underlying his success.
And in the post-COVID era, with law firms struggling to adapt to a new operating framework with limited visibility into operations, BigHand Now has proved to be the right tool at the right time. That’s why AmLaw 100 firms like DLA Piper and Baker Donelson accelerated their rollout of the software in the last 60 days, in order to smooth the transition to a firm-wide remote work force. With lawyers and staff all suddenly working from home, it’s been necessary for virtually everyone to reinvent the rules and procedures that keep work flowing seamlessly between front and back office. BigHand Now is how law firm management can bring order and efficiency to their reconfigured operations; it’s flexible enough to adapt to any new organizational structure, and it provides management controls along with real-time visibility into operational data that ensures your team can make the fact-based decisions necessary to keep the work flowing and evenly distributed.
BigHand designed and built the software several years ago, well before anyone had an inkling about the dramatic disruption that lay in store for the legal industry with the sudden emergence of COVID-19. The original business purpose envisioned for BigHand Now was to enable firms to achieve visibility and greater operational efficiency, as they began to reduce the overall level of support staff and became less reliant on the traditional general legal secretary assigned to each attorney. With a flexible way to facilitate new workflows, BigHand Now gave firms an easy way to transition to a more centralized model for administrative support, along with reporting to inform management decision-making. It’s precisely that same flexibility and access to data that proved invaluable when everyone suddenly began working from home.
“Team leads and managers need technology that allows requests to be worked on locally or nationally, as volume dictates,” explains Brett Chapman, COO at Husch Blackwell, another firm successfully using BigHand Now to support its administrative operations. “You can’t manage what you can’t see, so gaining visibility of fundamental aspects of the support function has been key to take our service delivery to new heights.”
Of course, no one really has clarity about how long it’s going to take for us to return to a more traditional operating environment. Some firms are planning for a very gradual transition back to the office whereas other are contemplating a future operating framework with a greatly reduced office footprint. Therein lies the ongoing advantage of using BigHand Now since it provides your firm with the flexibility to transition gradually and end up with whatever organizational structure or office footprint that proves to be best suited to your business needs. And looking further down the road, BigHand Now also provides a gateway so you can easily integrate your workflow with outsourced services providers, if and when that becomes part of your firm’s operating strategy.
Highly flexible, easy to deploy, easy to create new workflows and easy for everyone to use. Those are the essential qualities that make BigHand Now the right tool for our time – the right tool to make sure your firm’s administrative work gets done on time.
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Please contact inquiry@bighand.com for more information or if you would like to arrange for a brief run through of how BigHand Now can support your firm’s operational needs.