MinterEllison opts for Appian

MinterEllison, one of Australia’s largest law firms, has automated its business process management system on the Appian Low-Code Platform. With 3000+ partners and staff servicing government, private and public clients, the firm forecasts that the new system will save 42,000 billable hours in 2023.

“Our old business process management system was 10 years old and had reached end-of-life,” MinterEllison Chief Digital Officer Gary Adler said.

“We wanted to use that as an opportunity to automate in a way that improved the efficiency of our lawyers and legal teams, lowered risk and offered enhanced client services.

“The biggest challenge we faced in automating the system was migrating our teams away from a system they were highly familiar with. Using Appian, we’ve been able to create custom applications that are straightforward, with a similar look and feel to what our lawyers are used to, which has made the transition as seamless as possible.”

MinterEllison developed a Best Practice Matter Management system using Appian, something it says is a first for an Australian law firm. By integrating multiple legacy platforms into a single platform with Appian, the firm has increased workflow efficiency and decreased operational risk, as the system ensures all matters are handled within their established service-level agreements (SLAs).

“Appian offered MinterEllison the flexibility to consolidate all the varied activities and areas of the business onto one platform, which we named ‘Beacon’. After just one year, the new system had managed 8000 legal matters, and in the 2023 financial year, MinterEllison expects it to manage 20,000 matters,” Adler said.

“We have measured that Appian saves us between 10 and 30% per matter, equalling up to 42,000 lawyer billable hours in the coming financial year.”

Enhancing the employee experience, improving workflows and knowledge sharing were key requirements for the Beacon platform. The platform also had to simplify work, as a significant portion of lawyer and support staff time is spent trying to find the right content or information in order to execute a task.

“Instead of our lawyers having to spend time searching through multiple systems or speaking with different people to get the information they require, the Beacon platform captures relevant information and provides it to the person who needs it, when they need it. That means we’re now able to surface knowledge and information to the right user, at the right time, so they can perform the right task. That’s a huge improvement for staff because they’re not wasting time searching around systems for content or information that they need to do their work,” said Ken Porter, Director, Legal Service Operations at MinterEllison.

Externally, the platform offers an extra level of service and transparency to MinterEllison’s clients, who can now access 24/7 real-time information about the progress of their matters via a digital portal.

The automated business process management system can be easily and continuously tailored as the firm’s and clients’ needs evolve in the future. In the meantime, MinterEllison continues to add new functionality, legal matter types, legal teams and clients to the platform, with the goal being that the entire business operates through this single, unified platform.

Image credit: iStock.com/Ekaterina Aleshinskaya