Situation
The law firm, Curwoods, specialises in insurance and commercial litigation advice and one of its major clients is a large insurance company. Chief Operating Officer at Curwoods, James Hardy explains, "a lot of our work involves insurance and we need to provide account managers at the insurance company with summaries of the cases we are currently working on for them." He adds, "One of our largest clients approached us recently wanting access via an extranet to information about their current matters, so we approached BSD to see what we could give them."
Hardy continues, "we have an existing practice management system called Open Practice and when we asked Brennan for help, they looked at it and told us what was possible. This was important for us. It was no good us going to our client and promising everything if we couldn't deliver, so Brennan told us what was feasible and we took that to our client."
Solution
The solution, which BSD implemented, is a secure extranet allowing Curwoods' client access up to date data on their current matters. As Hardy explains, "account managers can access our data and see a summary of their own matters as well as drill down through the history of individual matters to get the details that they need."
The extranet was developed in consultation with Curwoods' client. Hardy explains, "we asked our client what they liked about other extranets they had experience with and what they didn't. We also asked them what they wanted from ours and Brennan developed a solution that gave them exactly what they wanted to see." He adds, "The client loves it!"
David Vaughan, Software Development Consultant at Brennan explains some of the issues in developing Curwoods' extranet. "There were some important parameters in the solution we developed. Curwoods didn't want the extra overhead of administration staff having to re-enter data that was already stored elsewhere so utilising the data from the existing practice management software was critical. The solution also had to seamlessly integrate with the existing software without requiring changes or upgrades to it." He adds, "Security was also key, the solution had to be secure and locked down so it was only accessible by the client and so other clients' data was protected too."
Other issues included designing the extranet interface so that it closely resembled the rest of Curwoods website so that there was easy brand identification for clients. To keep ahead of competitors, Curwoods also needed a fast and robust solution.
Benefits
For Curwoods the benefits of the new extranet extend beyond being a valuable service to the one client it was designed for. As Vaughan explains, "the solution was designed as an extensible solution so it can be easily extended to other clients." For Hardy, this is important, "this is a great marketing tool for the firm. We can show our clients what an extranet is and what it can offer them. It's a way for us to keep ahead of the competition. We've already received some positive press coverage as a result of implementing the extranet and we're looking to roll the extranet out to other clients in the future."
"At Curwoods we wanted to be at the forefront of this technology and thanks to Brennan and their people we can do this." Hardy adds, "I know if I ask something of Brennan, it will get done and that's comforting in my role here. We deal with clients who spend millions of dollars with us and we don't want them to be embarrassed. When we roll out something like this it's great to know it will work."
