Making legal technology work harder for law firms

Are law firms making the most of their technology investment? Most businesses only use a fraction of the capability of their existing technology, underestimating what platforms such as Microsoft 365 or their case management systems can already do. As a result, firms often purchase overlapping software that performs similar functions, increasing cost and complexity without delivering real value.

Its a pet subject for legal technology consultants Stephen Lucas and Mike Taylor who join Today's Conveyancer Podcast host David Opie for this latest episode exploring how law firms can improve efficiency, reduce duplication, and understand the “art of the possible” when it comes to legal tech, automation and AI.

The first part of that process involves understanding what systems are in place, what the firm actually needs to achieve, and where simple changes or integrations can unlock efficiencies. Poor technology decisions are often made because firms do not clearly define their requirements before engaging with vendors. Sales processes can oversell functionality, leading to costly long-term contracts and difficult system migrations. 

In the age of artificial intelligence, both are advocates of robotic process automation (RPA) as a practical solution for interoperability and automation; helping where systems cannot easily integrate. RPA allows “robots” to replicate human actions, logging into portals, copying and pasting data, triggering workflows, at far greater speed and accuracy. Tasks that might take a member of staff ten minutes can often be completed in under a minute, without errors, and even run outside office hours. By eliminating repetitive administrative tasks, firms not only save money but also reduce risk, improve compliance, and free staff to focus on higher-value work. Importantly automation does not typically lead to resistance from employees. Instead, staff often welcome it, as it removes frustrating and monotonous tasks from their daily workload.

When it comes to AI closed, UK-hosted AI environments, rather than the large language models like ChatGPT, CoPilot and Claude, that allow firms to benefit from document summarisation, case analysis and risk identification without exposing confidential information. And rather than trying to do everything all at once, a process-driven approach will yield better results; mapping the end-to-end legal workflow, identifying pain points, and introducing technology incrementally.

Ultimately, say Lucas and Taylor, firms don't need to be spending thousands of pounds on new technology; rather they should be focusing on maximising the functionality of existing technology with simple interconnectivity solutions. 

The Today's Conveyancer podcast can be found on your preferred podcast provider and also at www.todaysconveyancer.co.uk. Subscribe and listen in for all the latest conveyancing industry news and views. 

Thank you to our podcast sponsors LEAP Legal Software

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:23

You're listening to the Today's Conveyancer Podcast deleting sorts of information for residential property lawyers in England and Wales. Don't forget to subscribe and sign up to our free newsletter at today'sconveyancer.co.uk. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

SPEAKER_01 0:43

Hello, welcome along to the latest Today's Conveyancer Podcast. Today, welcome along Steve Lucas and Mike Taylor, technology consultants in the legal space, and the discussion is all about how law firms can make the most of their technology. It was really interesting because in the run-up to organizing this podcast, met with Steve and was talking about what he does and how he does it. We were talking about that mantra or that thing that I think we all know about we probably use 10 to 15% of the ability of the technology that we've got in our hands on our mobile phones or in our businesses. And we know it can do more, but we don't always make the most of how to do that. And from what I understood when we were chatting, Steve, that's a really big part of your role and what you do with firms is to help them make more of what they have rather than you know encourage them to go and invest in a whole load of new stuff.

SPEAKER_02 1:43

Yeah, that's exactly right. So our main focus and supposed mantra is work on what you've got, make the most of it before you start investing in new systems, go down that disruption of finding a new system and the rip and replace and all that sort of stuff. So a big a big focus of ours is just trying to get people to make the most of it. And if they can't make the most of what they've got in the business we've got, we can develop things at a better, better price and a better, better way of accessing the technologies, a cheaper way. So you know, we we don't we don't advocate for full change, we just advocate for what have you got? Let's just try and build these little building blocks around it to make your lives a bit easier, really.

SPEAKER_03 2:21

There's also that side of things where one companies don't know what they actually want, they don't know what they've got. So they've bought a load of software over the years and they've accumulated all these things. Does crossover, so they've also they've got about two two or three systems that all do the same thing, um, but they don't know. And then the other piece would be the new shiny thing. So AI is obviously the the thing on everyone's end of the end of everyone's tongue. People want to do AI, don't really know what understand it, don't really know what what they want to do. Some people are scared of it, everyone knows they need to do it. Yeah, so there's always that thing of these companies don't actually a lot of the time know exactly what they want.

SPEAKER_02 2:58

Really? I mean, take like Microsoft 365, it's massive. No one really pays a lot of money for that a month, really. There's so much technology and solutions in that platform. You've got a whole load of things just in the cupboard that you're not using straight away, really.

SPEAKER_01 3:10

We'll absolutely get onto that because what I know when we were sort of chatting, Steve, we were saying we use Word, Outlook, Excel, might use PowerPoint. Yeah, it's got an awful lot more in it in its armoury. Uh let's start with uh what makes you guys qualified to uh provide this information and and consultancy to the legal sector. I mean, Mike, what's your what's your background? Well, tell us a bit about yourself.

SPEAKER_03 3:33

So I'm uh if you like a software developer by trade, going back to sort of 2006-07. Uh Steve was actually my boss originally prior to that.

SPEAKER_02 3:44

Still I'm David. I think I still have people.

SPEAKER_03 3:47

And then over the years working my way up to in different law firms as a team manager, IT director, CTOs, and all the titles, which they give you sort of board-level stuff. Went out the legal sector for a couple of years and then sort of come back. So, yeah, understand the pain points from all sides, really. So, understanding the processes. I've also got a couple of companies. So, I've got a marketing agency who provide lead gen for law firms specifically, and then we've got what what Ste and I do, which is the the automation, which is in it in a bit of technology, which do all the integrations and the automations, which will which we'll get onto. So that's that's a short bit of my uh my C V there. What about yourself, Steve?

SPEAKER_02 4:26

Similar to be fair. So again, Mike came to work for me many years ago as a developer. I think I was an IT director in a law firm at that point, and then my career just carried on. I went to work in other different places, took Mike with me a good couple of times to be fair, because he you know he's a good developer. He's one of them developers who can just ask him, can we do this? And he's gone, give me, give me an hour, give me two hours. So we we always we always work together on a on on automation for law firms, like from the very, very early days, and even so much so that we we created the first sort of sky red red button application for a conveyance 2000 and something, you know, when it was the old school Sky Digital Plus stuff. So we've all we've always we've always worked together on automation stuff, but our journeys have been similar in the sense of we've both hit CTO level and board member level jobs in our own sort of independent roles, and then we we we decided probably sometime last year, we've always been sort of friends and stayed in touch. We've had some ideas for automating various different things. Let's just get the sort of band back together a little bit and uh and go that way. But yeah, similar, we've all got similar sorts of similar backgrounds. We've done software, we've done networks, we've done supplier management, we've done IT director, IT manager, CTO. Um, but that gives us like you know 20 plus years of experience each to bring to the table and just go, you know, you're still doing the same thing. Some law firms that we were doing 20 years ago was innovative then, but now it's not really. So, you know, helping law firms sort of catch up to where the world is. So, yeah, similar backgrounds, really.

SPEAKER_01 5:53

I mean, I want to dive into lots of what you've kind of talked about there, but one of the things that stood out for me was the the point you make about crossover of of systems. And you know, I think we see this in in an awful lot of businesses where they've invested in technology that they know does one particular thing, but they're not particularly aware of some of the other functionality that it's got, that then they go off and find another piece of software that does that. Yeah. Yeah, how how do we tackle that? Is it is that an education issue? I mean, is it is it actually is it a sales issue? Because you know, there's a responsibility on the sort of sales process to make people and firms much more aware of some of the capabilities of these products and services.

SPEAKER_02 6:35

Yeah, and that that that's where the consultancy side of the business comes into because one of our main sort of roles is providing that support and assistance to law firms. So actually sitting down with them and getting the requirements down on a bit on a piece of paper as to what they actually want to do. Sometimes that just makes the law firm focus their mind and go, actually, we don't really want to do that, we don't need that type of software. And then it's back to vendors and working out well, does does product A do what law firm thinks? You do get a bit of a problem with salespeople, they'll obviously oversell the product and they'll say it'll do X, Y, and Z, and then in reality it doesn't.

SPEAKER_01 7:07

No.

SPEAKER_02 7:07

So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:10

Salespeople oversell products, date.

SPEAKER_02 7:12

Yeah, they do amazingly, they do, yeah, really. But you know, I think because we're because because we know the products that are out there and we know the pitfalls and we know what they do and don't do. It's a good thing when a lawyer brings in a consultant who knows the industry like that, so they can advise them properly. Um sometimes we come in too late and it's they've made a decision and they're you know, they've gone to a different case management system and they haven't really understood what they're gonna lose by going to that system, and then they end up going back, and it's it's managing that fallout and the demigration, if you like, and going back to where to where they were. So you know, they've got to get some help sometimes, just work out what what they've got, what they haven't got, and and and try and make a better decision, I think.

SPEAKER_01 7:49

In your sort of experience, Mike, as uh you know, m moving your way up through the the IT departments in in firms, uh, vendor management is obviously critical. Is it a an area that firms invest enough time into?

SPEAKER_03 8:02

Some do, some don't. I think I think there's there's definitely over the years, there's definitely the culture of getting on the phone to their mates who's also got a law firm saying what software do you use, and that's pretty much the all investigation they'll do. But then as the company grows as well, and this isn't this isn't just typical to sort of legal, as those law firms grow, your departments get siloed. So you've got a marketing department, you've got an IT department, you've got a front-end department, sort of first response sort of thing, the call center type stuff, and then you've got your lawyers, and everyone goes off and buys their own software and there's crossover and all that type of stuff. And then at some point, a CTO will come in or someone like Steve will come in and go, Well, hang on a minute, you've got 15 bits of software here that all cross over you know what you're trying to solve. So I don't think it's specifically to legal, sort of supposed to answer your question, is typic typically I think a lot of it to on majority. I don't know what you think, Steve, is is an afterthought. So they're it's only it's only later on when they're when they're trying to do a new a new project or bring something else in, where they bring someone like Stay in and go and get reviewed, and they go, Ah, we didn't we didn't know this. We probably should have spent some time on this three years ago.

SPEAKER_02 9:16

The vendors are happy with that, aren't they? Because the vendors just think, okay, well, just just buy the software and then you know it's in there for normally three to five years anyway. It's contracted, it it's making sure you made you made that decision before you get locked in. So contract you can't go out of because you've accepted the software and you know it's uh it's embedded.

SPEAKER_03 9:33

The embedded is the key word there, so it's not just uh contracts, especially if you talk case management systems. You use a case management system for five years to move then to something else is uh that's massive, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 9:44

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 9:45

It's uh it's a big headache, yeah. It's huge.

SPEAKER_01 9:49

I think uh one of the issues that a lot of firms face is the interoperability of systems, and we we've kind of touched on that in the course of the discussion so far. That that feels like uh an increasingly important part of trying to drive efficiencies within organisations. And we've seen it, you know, we've seen it in conveyancing massively over the course of the last 10 or 15 years. And I think we're starting to see it now in in other areas of of the law as well. Is that a big that presumably is a big part of what you guys are doing in terms of working with firms to ensure that the systems are all talking to each other, the data's able to be shared, uh, and you know, importantly that there's there's security between all of that as well.

SPEAKER_02 10:30

Yeah, and it's that it's that interoperability point you raised. So the article we wrote for today's media uh a couple of weeks ago around RPA robotic process automation, that's that's the the ultimate sort of fallback for interoperability. So the Nirvaras, the systems can all talk to each other and you can move data between different things. And in reality, it's it's not as easy as that sometimes. There's there's no API or there's no way to import or export. So you know, we we've we've been able to come up with things where you know the robots can do it at a at a fraction of the cost of what it would take to sometimes develop integration. So I think I think they have got to be mindful when they purchase a piece of software what level of interoperability they can have and what level of integration they can do with it. Otherwise, again, it's just an it's another problem to be dealt with by the you know the legal the legal text, which can be costly, really.

SPEAKER_01 11:22

Help us out here, Steve, because we've just dived into robotic process automation. And I'm gonna be quite frank, although I read the article, it's still quite difficult to understand. Give us the plotted definition.

SPEAKER_02 11:35

It it's essentially whatever whatever you can do as a human, like you know, moving the mouse and clicking on things on a system, or typing something in, or reading something and copy and paste them, the robot can essentially do that. So we have tools which will go on like a conveyancing website, for example, and log in and take all the details of the of the property that's been sold, the quote that's been provided, certain documents, and take that and put it into someone's case management system. Whereas the old way of doing that is you've got to integrate into some sort of API and send data and pull data, and you've got to pay a developer ridiculous amounts of money to do it. But RPA in its sort of base terms is if you can do it as a human in a in a case management system, you can click on things and you can type things in, but then we can we can take that manual task away, and the robot using RPA can can do it. So a lot a lot of the AI that's taught to the boat can be classed as RPA as well. You know, it's just that it's just that robotic process, it's just something that's repeatable over and over and over again, but it can save a law firm like ridiculous amounts of hours, mate. Can't we just we've just done one now, which is just you know, it just gives give them so much time back, hasn't it?

SPEAKER_03 12:44

In in simple terms, you say, for example, you've got uh an admin member of staff that logs into a portal, fills in a form, and because there's no integration, they then have to copy and paste something out into the case management system, then maybe run a workflow and press a couple of buttons. That could take them 10 minutes, for example. The robot can do that in a minute or less, and there's no mistakes. So obviously you've got human error in there as well.

SPEAKER_02 13:12

So obviously, typing things wrong, Artie.

SPEAKER_03 13:15

Typing things, you know, copy and pasting stuff over and accidentally doing it. There's a there's data issues, obviously, data, you know, compliance issues, potentially sticking something in the wrong case and all that side of side of things. But it can also really be quite clever in that the the the robot and uh the underlying technology. Selenium is one of one of the technologies we use, say that after a couple of drinks. Essentially, what what it can do is interrogate that the software and it has to do a bit more than a human can. So it could go to a website and actually read the HTML underlying HTML and pull some of the HTML out and then process that and move that over to the case management system or from the case management system into something else, or just simply running tasks within a case management system. Some CMSs don't have the ability to do automation. So all essentially we do, we go, right? Well, how do you, for example, how do you send a letter? You have to click here, you have to get the case, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Select the right one, press send. We just record that, and you know, every every 10, 20 seconds it sends one. Whereas a human could take again 10 minutes. Return investment is is amazing. Obviously, you can schedule them to go out of hours. All types of factors come in. So some systems run slower if lots of people are on them at once. So you could have this running at night rather than in the day and all this type of stuff. So it's its capabilities are sort of endless, really.

SPEAKER_02 14:38

We we always say they don't they don't go sick, they don't turn up late, you know. They just they just do what they're told and just take over. It's a similar technology that you see in like the uh the ticket out world where the they'll send a bot at like Ticketmaster and buy 10,000 tickets. You know, it's it's the same technology, but they're just using it for something they shouldn't probably be using it for. Saves time, saves money, you know, keeps people like people happy.

SPEAKER_03 15:00

And the the the beauty of it is people people are naming these robots as well. The the companies are working and starting to name them. The latest one's called Stanley, Stan the Man. Is it is that what they call it? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:11

Yeah, we get quite attached to it. We think like people sometimes think, well, the robots are coming, they're gonna take me job, type of stuff. But we've actually found another way, they're actually quite like protective as a robot, and the robot's saving loads of time. So we've got a couple of there that have been named, named by the staff, which is which is is quite funny.

SPEAKER_01 15:28

You know, you touched on on AI, and and it's very difficult to have any conversation at the moment without that sort of rolling off the tongue. But I mean, you know, how much of this was achievable you know five, ten years ago, and and how much of it is achievable because of the you know the development of technology and and the development of AI?

SPEAKER_02 15:51

Well, I mean, RPA has been around like forever, hasn't it? So one of the big case management systems proclaim they've had a thing called TaskSaver, which has been around forever, and that's a that's an early sort of form of RPA, really. AI now is obviously everyone somewhat AI and it does it does a whole load of things. Um when used properly, it's it's brilliant. A lot of law firms are scared of it, really, because of the compliance bits and pieces, and where does your data go and all that type of stuff? And it's it is a concern, you know, when you put your data into a into like chat GPT, for example, or some sort of LLM, where does it go? Does it learn from it? Does it then spit it back out where it shouldn't spit it back out somewhere? But again, we've just we've just done what we've always done and gone back to our basics of protect client data, protect the network, look after things. And we've got partners we use in our business which are like a closed LLM. So the LLM, the Chat GPT brain is is segmented from the internet, it's in a it's in a data centre in the UK, it's not on the internet, it's not a public one, it's a closed one just for that law firm. So we just approached it. Well, okay, AI is a good thing, it's you know, it helps helps all sorts of problems be solved. But there's a compliance and a data protection issue that everyone's really worried about. But it's it's pretty good. We we we use it a lot for reading documents and summarising things and summarising case history. So one law firm client we've got, uh they they use it to just review personal injury files and it summarises the case, spots risk and spots raise different things and gives its opinion on the success of the case just based on the notes in the history, which is quite cool. But uh obviously, you probably know there's a thing called hallucinations in AI, and you've really got to tell the AI what to do and what not to do. People don't think about the what not to do, but that's how you reduce these hallucinations and you get true accurate results from from an AI system. But it doesn't solve all the problems, AI, and everyone goes on and on about AI, and you know, it's gonna again it's gonna steal our jobs and do certain things, but I don't think it's there yet. But in a year's time, it's gonna be such a different beast, mic, isn't it? It's gonna be something math, I think.

SPEAKER_03 17:55

Yeah, I think people are like a lot of the a lot of the tools out there that when you when you break down what they're doing is they're putting some textual information, whether it be an email, a document, or something, into a LLM and they they give us some parameters. I think a lot of this is it's very similar, and we're only just scratching the service um in the legal industry, definitely, on what what it can do. The the fear obviously is obviously people sticking client data into chat GPT and into you know Claude or whatever, just saying, oh, can you just summarize this for me? Which people are doing. And then as Steve mentioned, there we we work with a partner where we can actually get if if they wanted to, if depending on how secure they wanted to get, we're gonna actually stick this in their in their own data center so it never leaves their their data center at all. Where where it will go though, some of the advanced stuff that they're doing now with images, videos, and we know this because the the sort of marketing agency side of things, but also writing code and this sort of almost almost having an uh an agent or an AI employee where you can go and get it to do tasks and and schedule them. So rather than just going waiting for me to press the button to go and do something, the future will be it will just go off and do these things systematically when when other things happen. And I'll just go, this has happened in a case. I'm just gonna go off and you know do these next steps without anyone even asking me to. That that's where it's gonna go, and that that's where you can start to think about the sort of robots telling D AI what to do.

SPEAKER_02 19:26

Yeah, and then we've got terminator seven, the uh sequel way. And that we're all we're all living in uh shadow, but there's been some funny things recently. I don't know whether you you keep up on the tech news on that paper, but there's there's been like the clawed vendor machine where it's it's it's it's experiment was to run so clawed the anth anthropic AI, but was to run a vending machine and it decided the prices, and its goal was to make as much money as possible. It realized that the way to do that was to not give refunds for anything. So when people were buying things and you're like out of date, it was like it was coming up with all different ways of not giving the refund, it could keep the profits, and that was its only goal. So there's some funny, some fun stories out there. That the worst one I heard was a couple of years ago where they had two AI bots speaking to each other about how they solve humanitarian problems, for example, in the world, and it kept running scenarios back and forward, and they come up with the ultimate solution of genocide will just solve all of all of mankind's problems, so just like wipe them out of it. I suppose when they start strapping machine guns to AI things and all sorts of stuff, that's when you you've got to worry. But for now, it's just computers arguing with each other, I suppose.

SPEAKER_01 20:26

I think one of the things that strikes me about whether it's robotic process automation, whether it's AI, and to a certain extent, whether it's just you know vendor management or choosing the right technology, there's a real art of the possible challenge. And you know, I think you mentioned it earlier in the in the conversation, Mike. It's about helping organizations understand what they think they need in the first place. I mean, what that's two-thirds of the battle, isn't it? Because then you can go and you can find the right solutions, but it's that that whole process of understanding that art of the possible is is the real challenge.

SPEAKER_03 20:59

The way my brain works is I I see things and processes, probably why I fell into doing this for a living. So if you take any sort of legal process, every different type of law, or so I say conveyance has got its own sort of path, yes, it can go into sale, purchase, remortgage, and all those type of things, certain types of claims, HDR and PCP and all that, those type of things tend to have their own sort of way of running. So the way I've always looked at it is gone right, okay, there's the end-to-end process that there's where the lead comes in, there's where the the case finishes, and then either get they complete on their home or they they get their money from you know the the claim or what whatever the ending is. And then it's to go which bit of software can can fix which bit of the process. What I've found over the years that people try and use the case management system to do everything. It's some case management systems are brilliant at running cases, but then they'll try and use the same thing on the front end to do like to handle the lead generation of this business, force flat space, quite simply because it's too slow. So cut some case management systems can take sort of like they've got these automated processes, could take hours before it responds to someone who's online. But if you do that online, you've got about a second before someone's going off to your competitor. And then likewise, when you get to the back end of things, so that the sort of the finance stuff, some of the case management systems have it built in, some do integrations, some don't for. Go anywhere near it. Um, so people put all these different tools in to try and try and do that. So when you're talking about AI and all these bits of things, is exactly the same way as going, right? Okay, well, if we want to use AI, where in the process should we should we put it and start small and then and then go out? So take take emails, for example. So emails coming into a business, most law firms have a single mailbox which all the all this data goes to. We've actually got a system that looks at these mailboxes, reads them, and then puts them into the case in into the right case. So it reads what's in the file, and then you can go, well, okay, well, can I summarize that in AI? Really simple, as you know. Can we then use some AI to find out if there's any issue? So is it a complaint? Does the compliance need to know? Is it is there a risk on this email? You know, does that need to go to go to a compliance as well? And you can start to build up this sort of process of of each stage of the case. And I think I think that's where potentially some people go wrong, is they get these ideas that they need to use a tool and then just try and push it out everywhere rather than just going, okay, well, let's start here, perfect that. Like what else can it do? And just systematically build out a um a year's sort of or or a couple of years worth of worth of work, you know what I mean? Well, like a big, big plan rather than trying to try and just take over the world on day one.

SPEAKER_01 23:47

I I've I've heard the phrase you know, boiling the ocean. You have to sort of deal with these things in bite-sized chunks, Steve.

SPEAKER_02 23:53

Yeah, but definitely, I think that's the problem. So people, because the AI, AI is like the buzzer to meet. Everyone's AI this, AI, that. But you know, we get inquiries in about I want to talk about an AI chatbot that does X, Y, and Z. You'll go meet the prospective clients, and then when you sit down and start talking through it, you you find out that you don't have precedent letters that automatically get merged, and you don't have triggers that come in and send something. So you're like, well, okay, you you want to you want to have like the fancy Ferrari, but your staff are still copying and pasting word files when you can just create a button that sends all that. So, you know, there's a there's a there's a there's probably a responsibility on the law firm owners to actually just take a breather and just leave all that new noise and look after your core and then get that right before you start you know strapping the rockets on top of it, really. But yeah, that's the problem. Do you always want to do too much too quickly? It's not the right way to do it, really.

SPEAKER_01 24:44

We're heading towards the uh end of the time we have for the discussion, and uh I think if I was uh listening to this discussion rather than uh than then hosting it, I'd be sat there saying this all sounds well and good, but uh it's gonna be an expensive exercise to you know to to engage with people like yourselves who've got the experience and the expertise that you've you've got. Where where does that uh return on investment come from? How quickly do you kind of typically see that that that happens? Because you know, at the end of the day, law firms are businesses and and you know, these are decisions that are not just uh workflow uh and efficiency oriented, these are got to be commercial decisions as well.

SPEAKER_03 25:26

Yeah, so the the way we sort of um look at the the pricing model of these sort of the sort of robotic side of things, we we went back and forth, didn't we stay of like you know, did we do a flat fee? But we we we've settled with and it it seems to have proven quite well as a transaction model. So a bit like you would SMS or anything like that that law firms are used to paying is the these tasks that you wanted the robot to do, you just pay per transaction. So if you do a thousand, you pay for a thousand, if you do five thousand, ten thousand, and we we do scaling on the pricing. So that that seems to fit fit quite well into the model of you know how law firms sort of pay for things, and it's not just a big sort of 20, 30, 40 upwards strand project that you know can start small and then as it's as they get the return on investment, which we touch on in a sec, they can start thinking about okay, well, what else can it do? And the robot then starts to do other things within the business. So that thing about starting small and then going bigger, and then the return on investment side of things, which we investigate the tasks that they want the robots to do. We figure out, you know, sort of a ballpark of what that will be from a human to cost. So say it costs 10 pounds for a human to run one of these tasks. We have basically on the on the system, they have a dashboard, the config, and where the exceptions go. But then on a dashboard, you have things like you know, how many uh tasks have run, how many exceptions you've had, and you can do all different types of reports on it. But then the senior manager will then want, well, we're paying this money out, you know, what what what's what's our return of investment? And then quite simply we just have within the dashboard this is how much it costs a human to do. So we've run a thousand tasks, that would have cost a human 2,000 pounds. The robot there has done it for a fraction of that. And there's also the the time as well. So I'll see you would have took human could have taken two weeks to do that, and this has just done it in a couple of hours.

SPEAKER_02 27:24

Whenever we probably approach a project, either in the consultancy or in the software company, it's that it's that ROI we lead with, it's probably the way to say. So, you know, we we know my my background is uh I started life as an accountant, so I'm always always considering the power and shell and pens in any sort of business because that's what I was trained to do very early on. So, whenever we approach a client's consultancy or software, it's always okay, where's the return? What's the cost going to be? What are you gonna get back? So when we do a lot of projects around replacing people's PMSs and CMSs, there's a lot of cost in that from other consultancies because they they think they have to do everything from the sort of cradle to the grave. But in reality, when we we approach a project like that, we're just looking at the vendor selection, the vendor management bit, because in reality, all the project management stuff can be taken over by the vendor with with just a bit of oversight from the consultant at that point. So we're always we're always looking for the value in our services, but the return for the client's the most important thing, otherwise, what what's the point in spending the money? But the dashboards Mike speaks about, and then visuals being able to give a law firm, well, you save you save five people a week, you've now got a robot that costs you know half of that cost, it just brings it a lot to life and makes it a bit more visual for them. And you can log in at any time, or they can ask us and we can send them. But we always build in, we always build in the metrics and the KPIs, and then when the robots and when the consultants do various different things, you know, it it's very easy for us to present a dashboard that says this is the hours we've used, this is what we've accomplished, and this is what you should be seeing as a benefit, really. Otherwise, you just get asked after you've done three months, uh, you know, what have what have we actually done? What have we saved? Whereas we've we front load them questions and just say, you know, all the way through, you're gonna you're gonna find out. But the ROI is important, and again, that's what sort of can can set different consultants apart because the our background of we've done every single job within an IT department, we've also developed software, we've released software, we've we've done, we've done all them different areas. We know where the sort of where the fat lies in projects and where you waste hours, and we just you know steer the clients away from that, really.

SPEAKER_03 29:27

Yeah, and then I suppose there's one sort of hidden ROI which we hadn't considered, and that is so that these tasks, which generally are repetitive tasks that the robot does, obviously, change is always a big thing in in any company, but you know, obviously in law firms, you know, changing a piece of software, bringing a robot in, as Steve mentioned earlier, or it's coming in to take my job. People are actually thankful because it's like they can now get on with the job they're meant to do. So rather than spending an entire Monday logging into a bottle, copying and pasting stuff over, it's like I don't have to worry about that. I can actually do my job, which I'm getting paid to do, and you get a whole day back a week. Yeah, so that that's been sort of a hidden return on investment that we've seen.

SPEAKER_01 30:06

Yeah, like you say, sort of a bit of a double whammy in terms of both saving the the money on the delivery, but also then you know enabling a fee earner to bank a couple more units or or whatever it it might be.

SPEAKER_02 30:18

Give them some time back to do more more appropriate work. Um a lot of the things we do is is trying to cut out like the repetitive admin stuff, which is just you know, over and over, allocating mail, allocating post, and it's just it's just lost time in a law firm because it it only increases because they want more work, more cases, more cases equals more emails, more posts. So, you know, that that they're like the low-hanging, easy fruit where they can really see a return straight away because you're giving resource back to the firm.

SPEAKER_01 30:44

We could probably talk about this for the rest of the day, but we are out of time. It's been great to have you both on the podcast and and talk about sort of the the for me, what I would describe as as the art of the possible and to to get firms and organizations. I I know every time I have these conversations, I sit and I think to myself, gosh, how much admin do we do? How many repeatable tasks do we do that we can automate in in some way? It's useful to be reminded of that periodically. So my thanks both to Mike and to Steve for joining the podcast.

SPEAKER_02 31:15

Yeah, good. Appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 31:17

The Today's Conveyancer Podcast is available on your preferred podcast provider. It's also available on today'sconveyancer.co.uk. Thank you to Steve and to Mike. Thank you as ever for listening. And we'll see you again soon.

SPEAKER_00 31:29

You're listening to the Today's Conveyancer Podcast, the leading source of information for residential property lawyers in England and Wales. Don't forget to subscribe and sign up to our free newsletter at today'sconveyancer.co.uk. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.