Ross Forgione of Johnson Winter & Slattery on innovating with Intapp

Transcript

Ross Forgione, I’m Chief Information Officer at Johnson Winter & Slattery.

There is an opportunity for us to do something better. There is an opportunity for us to start with something which is stable, because, you know, the products themselves have, you know, proven themselves through time, which is great.

But then we can actually leverage, because, at its core, the system collects information. So be it time capture, be it the IB piece that transfers information and data around, you create an opportunity to transactionally pick up what people are doing already, and aside from just doing time entry, you’ve got all this other opportunity that you can do it with. If you can take that data and do something else with it, you start to actually see what happens inside of an organization. It’s not just limited to being a time billing function.

Not fearing bringing ideas into that process as well is very important because that helps me to promote innovation as well inside of our organization, too. So I like that approach.

Basically, we needed to give people more time to be lawyers and less time against administration. And we had a look at what the low hanging fruit, the real obvious steps that we could take to have an almost immediate impact, and, you know, the time capture piece was definitely one of them. When we had a look at our time capture processes, and as a firm, and we’re 25 years old now, our time capture processes basically grew organically as our firm grew because the way we use Intapp Time now, we’ve been able to enforce some of our timekeeper policies. Our policy is to contemporaneously record, so, within 48 hours, we want time to be recorded and released into the system. So we now can implement an auto-release feature. So we don’t need to wait for a week or a couple of weeks for people to chose to release their time.

One of the biggest detractors in a very short period of time, about four weeks, forwarded an email to me basically stating this product might actually be useful. And that’s actually high praise from this particular person. The key thing for this particular individual and others, as I’ve learned since that time, is the prompter. So we have logs enabled, so each day, the person receives a summary of their activities for the prior day, and they began using that to speed up their time capture process and transferring it across. They were able to mark that up, and this is kind of anti what the platform is trying to do, but we’ll take any little win, they could mark that up, pass it to their secretary, and their secretary could then process their time on their behalf.

That saved them a chunk of time and it was a more complete time capture process as well.

The mobile application platform, if that stops, for whatever reason, we hear about it immediately. That’s actually given our staff back some of their time. So we have practitioners and attorneys that will do time capture on their phone while they’re on the ferry crossing Sydney Harbor, while they’re taking their kids to soccer training at night. So it’s really given people back… you don’t have to be stuck at your desk, you know, to complete your administrative tasks, so that’s fantastic.

And for us, there are insights that we actually get out of the platform now, as well, so we’re doing some… we’re extracting insights or starting process and we’re seeing some initial stuff come through on, you know, helping people develop as well. So we can get a sense for, you know, someone with a lot of experience working on a particular matter, on a particular phase. We can compare that to others that perhaps are maybe starting that part of their journey and what someone who is doing something fantastic, picking that knowledge up and, you know, sharing it across over here by using the time capture information.