Seize the competitive edge with a clear-eyed view

Published in Briefing Live June 2024

Leveraging the power of its strategic partnership with Microsoft, Peppermint is on a mission to help firms simplify their tech estates and streamline their processes, says its director of operations Neil Henderson

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If the pandemic served as a much-needed wakeup call for digital transformation at large law firms, then the advent of generative artificial intelligence (genAI) is the jet fuel for finally getting to a truly modern, global way of working.

There’s intensifying urgency among firms to consolidate their tech stacks and data, observes Peppermint director of operations Neil Henderson, to achieve a single view of the firm and clients. Getting their data in order is essential for any firm looking to embark on the genAI journey, and therefore increasingly viewed as a strategic imperative. But many are being held back by a legal tech space that’s historically been underserved.

A combination of propriety products and widespread M&A activity in legal have produced unwieldy and unsustainable tech estates — “disparate solutions all welded together with chewing gum and Sellotape,” he jokes — the high total cost of ownership coupled with growing frustration over the disjointed state of firm data.

This is also proving prohibitive to delivering seamless journeys to their clients, he finds. “When was the last time you visited a bank branch, and why should law firms be any different? Clients, whether corporate or individual, increasingly expect to engage with their firm in modern ways — they want an omnichannel experience.”

Leveraging the power of its strategic partnership with Microsoft, the legal technology provider is on a mission to help firms simplify their tech estates and streamline their processes. Highlighting the scale of the challenge for some firms, he notes in one instance this involves replacing over 20 case management systems (CMSs) with its industry standard platform.

The breadth and depth of legal service delivery

Peppermint follows a ‘horizontal vs vertical’ solution approach, which allows it to build solutions much more effectively and rapidly, Henderson says. By creating a broad ‘horizontal’ solution for key process requirements, typically around matter management and compliance, it delivers a global view of all the firm’s matters. This universal layer can then be augmented with deep ‘vertical’ solutions that are tailored to each specific service line.

For Henderson, it’s important to stress the fact that he sees any technology implementation as a consultancy process. “It’s a business change project first and foremost — we want to understand the business problem we’re solving for before we even start discussing the technical details.”

The company views its role as that of “architects, not builders”, and many of its consultants have legal and business services backgrounds — giving the team the combined technical and industry expertise to understand law firm users’ day-to-day lives and how to solve their most pressing problems.

Built on Dynamics 365, he says the platform allows for “endless versatility and flexibility” to conform to any requirements, which are then delivered iteratively — significantly reducing time to value, and providing ample opportunity to assess and refine processes to help streamline tasks and reduce manual effort.

Process improvement that pays off

When it comes to process improvement, Henderson believes the biggest challenge firms face is managing change. He suggests much the same approach that Peppermint takes — by starting off any project with defining the desired outcomes, then creating a robust framework of objectives and measurable results to provide “a firmwide understanding of what they’re aiming to achieve from day one”.

Once the process has been defined, working in sprints using an agile methodology is key to successful change management, he explains, and to prevent the risk of change fatigue: “It’s important to pick a few priority areas to start with, introducing changes gradually and making sure to engage people along the way by demonstrating all the good progress being made. This will help maintain focus and build momentum.”

Making use of Peppermint’s low-code/no-code tools, firms can now rapidly configure, test and redefine their own processes — eliminating the back-and-forth involved with subject matter experts needing to explain their processes to a developer — thereby “empowering people who understand their processes intimately, end-to-end, to build their own dream solutions”.

Similarly, there’s tremendous benefit on the client side. By providing clients with a modern client portal, firms can now ‘couch’ key process activities into seamless self-service tasks. Besides enhancing client experience, this improves firm efficiency as clients can now carry out these actions instead, and ensures greater data accuracy as they input information directly into the system. It’s a win-win proposition.

But perhaps most significantly, it’s laying the data governance groundwork necessary for harnessing tech innovations that will continue to boost productivity and profitability well into the future. Through Peppermint, firms can securely access a whole raft of automations and AI-enabled features being deployed by Microsoft “at a truly incredible pace”. From predictive analytics for claims outcomes, to genAI reading and recording key actions in Outlook, Henderson sees proven, practical use cases for Copilot already at play — and scores more opportunities to impress on the horizon.