2020 hindsight: making good use of the lockdown

In association with LawWare: clearly, 2020 has been a year where you have had to do your best to control those aspects of work that you could control and roll with everything else

19th October 2020 | Simon Greig

That said, at LawWare, we've not let the lockdown prevent us from getting on with things...

Lockdown business continuity

Faced with social and economic challenges the likes of which we have never seen, we triggered our business continuity plan. This ensured our service and support remained uninterrupted during lockdown. All our team moved immediately to homeworking – in exactly the way LawCloud software is designed to operate.

In addition, all our LawCloud data centres activated their own business continuity plans to ensure maintenance of service at all times. Many clients also approached us to ask for help. We were happy to oblige by assisting them to set up remote/home work stations and by offering “own server” clients the option to move to the cloud. We believe this made a real difference.

Electronic signature and Outsourced Post Office

As a result of lockdown a planned initiative involving Sign&Send was fast-tracked.

Sign&Send provide both electronic signature and outsourced print and post services. Electronic signature gives you the ability to generate a Word document to email your client for them to sign and return it to you via email. As many of us are now working from home this makes a lot of sense for things like terms of business letters, mandates, etc. But you will also want to support clients that don’t have smartphones/tablets or even email. Sign&Send copes with this as well. You can generate your document and with a few clicks of your mouse, Sign&Send take it from your screen, add your letterhead, sign it, print it (overnight), put it in an envelope, add the postage and put it in the post for you.

So, Sign&Send provides a way of generating a physical letter/agreement and getting it to your

client via Royal Mail without you having to leave your home/office. The combination of these options delivered through a single interface means that you get on with your work without having to stop for any admin at all whilst providing the optimum level of service that your client can receive.

This integration was added in May and has been well received by our clients.

LawWare Academy

June saw the launch of the LawWare Academy. This free resource for LawWare clients contains manuals, training videos, webinar schedules and a whole host of useful information about LawWare software in a single resource library available on demand.

The online video and documented courses cover many aspects of the LawWare system from introductory lessons for beginners and interactive quizzes right through to specialist training for advanced users. Our clients can now learn wherever and whenever they like, track their progress as they learn and earn CPD credits. Many have now used this to improve their software skills.

Additional integrated forms

In July we added integration with FormEvo. FormEvo are the only independent forms supplier across the UK and will eventually replace the previous Oyez forms that are now being withdrawn from the market by new owners Advanced. As it turns out this is a blessing in disguise. FormEvo not only has a huge range of forms covering all types of work in Scotland

and England/Wales, but where these forms are electronically submittable, our clients can do this as well.

This is the future for all forms. Users completing them will be able to submit them to the relevant agency over the internet. We are just starting to see this happen now and it’s definitely the way forward. Agencies are under pressure to support electronic means of working both internally and with their partners and are scrambling to get their IT systems up to speed. Again sitting at my laptop with a range of forms as part of my LawWare document template
list just makes my working life easier and more effective. Capturing the salient information for populating forms and letters means I have less keying, less duplication and more functions available to me in one place.

Re-mortgage Portal integration This year also saw a commissioning client wishing to add bulk re-mortgage work to their new LawWare system.

This involved integrations with their new instructions Portals –LMS and TM Connect.

A lot has happened in 2020 and we are not finished yet.