Eversheds Accelerates New Business Acceptance with Intapp Open

Global News

23
Oct
2014

Editor

Leading international law firm sees significant success with Intapp conflicts management software

Intapp today announced that Eversheds LLP, a leading international law firm with more than 4,500 legal and business advisers worldwide, has implemented Intapp Open software for conflicts management. Eversheds selected Intapp Open last year as part of a firm-wide programme to streamline business acceptance, and was recently shortlisted for the prestigious British Legal Awards 2014 "Best Use of Technology" award.

Now live and in production, the software has streamlined conflicts searches and accelerated the evaluation of new clients and matters for the firm. Using Intapp Open, the Conflicts and Compliance team at Eversheds now process an average of 160 conflicts searches a day, or approximately 42,000 annually.

With 52 offices across 30 countries, Eversheds has a proven track record in conflicts management; however, its previous approach required lawyers to spend a great deal of time evaluating and responding to long, complex conflicts reports. Since implementing Intapp Open, the administrative burden on lawyers and staff has been reduced significantly. By automatically filtering and cleaning the data generated by conflicts searches, Intapp Open has enabled the Conflicts and Compliance team to create simplified, shorter reports which rank potential conflicts in the order of priority, and eliminate clearly irrelevant results. The system also provides the firm's management with visibility of similar conflicts searches being initiated across different parts of the business, enabling partners to align across various practice areas and regions as needed.

"Once we switched the new system on, the benefits of using Intapp Open were immediately apparent to key stakeholders across the business – saving time and resources, reducing risk for the firm, and ultimately improving our responsiveness to clients," said Kerry Kendal, Head of Operations, Eversheds LLP. "The efficiency gains have allowed the Conflicts team to deliver an enhanced service, enabling lawyers to open matters faster, and enabling the Conflicts team to support the effective execution of the overall business strategy of the firm."

The success of the conflicts analysis programme has received widespread recognition at Eversheds from lawyers and firm management, including an award for "Best Project". Based on this success, the Conflicts and Compliance team has been allocated additional resources to expand its scope and charter. In July of this year, Eversheds launched an expanded new business acceptance programme, to help assess new client matters in terms of their financial viability, potential for growth, and fit with the long-term business goals of the firm. In addition, the Conflicts team has been tasked with extending the conflicts analysis programme beyond the UK and across Eversheds International.

"The Conflicts team at Eversheds has done an outstanding job of demonstrating how highly efficient conflicts analysis links to better business strategy and execution for the firm," said Pat Archbold, Head of the Risk Practice at Intapp. "We're very excited that Intapp Open has been central to enabling Eversheds's expanded business acceptance programme."