The challenge

Working closely with their corporate practice, the Knowledge & Information Services team at Fieldfisher identified verification as a major pain point that needed priority attention.

Lawyers were using a combination of Word, Excel, their document management system, and the occasional large lever arch file, which was inefficient, not environmentally friendly and unfavourable to both the client experience and employee morale.

Before the adoption of Atticus, Rochelle Garnon, Head of Knowledge & Information Services at Fieldfisher explained their previous process was extremely slow.

“Version control was a nightmare, and only one person could work on the document at any one point in time. Analysis was limited to the amount of text that can be inserted within an Excel cell,” Rochelle said.

The team recognised that they needed to find a solution urgently, and moved quickly to conduct a market review to understand the needs of their corporate practice.

The solution

Fieldfisher first used Atticus when a large deal came in with a tight, three-week turnaround. Having seen how easy it was to get started on Atticus, the firm agreed a deal and the project was underway.

On their first project, Fieldfisher were delighted with how quickly users were up-and-running. 

“The whole process was very smooth. The Atticus team were forthcoming with the information we needed and the training required is minimal” Rochelle said.

Version control was the biggest pain point for Fieldfisher before using Atticus. The platform ‘perfectly’ addressed this need, with the firm now enjoying a ‘slick transition with every uploaded draft’.

“The way Atticus deals with version control is a thing of beauty.”

As a platform that supports real-time collaboration, Atticus also enabled the team at Fieldfisher to work on the platform simultaneously. This mitigated the time previously spent waiting for people to respond to emails and facilitated a more dynamic approach to a traditionally linear process.

The success for Fieldfisher

Fieldfisher quickly noticed they were able to derive value from the product:

“The benefits to using Atticus were instantly visible, from the automatic boxing-up to multiple people being able to work on the document at any one point in time,” Rochelle explained.

As well as streamlining Fieldfisher’s processes, Atticus is helping the firm to work towards their environmental sustainability goals, swapping out the paper-based lever arch files for a digitalised approach.

Rochelle said that “having conducted a comparison between time spent on verification using the old manual way versus the new Atticus way, we have time savings of up to 60%.”

As a technology-focused firm, Fieldfisher is committed to leveraging technology to deliver client services more efficiently. Atticus ‘fitted this mandate perfectly’, and adoption was a ‘complete no-brainer’.

Client and lawyer feedback has been very positive, resulting in Atticus quickly becoming the norm for verification across Fieldfisher’s corporate practice.

“Implementing Atticus was a complete no-brainer,” Rochelle said.