⸻ Customer Stories
Efficiency in practice:
How Stephensons LLP transformed case management
Company background
Stephensons is an award-winning top 150 law firm, with over 250 staff based in six offices across the UK.
With a philosophy of making it easier for clients to access legal services, Stephenson’s relies on its digital platforms for service delivery. Fee earner efficiency and data security are critical factors in maintaining high standards of service and the firm’s exceptional reputation.
LIMA and Stephensons have been on a journey together since 2019. What began with a single disaster recovery (DR) project is now a fully-fledged strategic partnership. By working together with LIMA to focus on solving broader business challenges, the firm’s IT delivery reached new heights.
The challenge
When Stephensons first came to LIMA in 2019, the firm was struggling with poor user experience within its IT systems – particularly with regard to its Visual Files case management system.
This situation resulted in lost revenue, as fee-earners were unable to work efficiently on the slow software.
There was also concern within the organisation about a potential lack of resilience and business continuity, which could present a major issue in the event of an outage or cyber attack.
The solution
LIMA worked closely with Stephenson’s to understand existing systems and the firm’s key priorities around fee-earner experience and resilience.
Following consultation, Stephensons took on LIMA's ProActive managed service to bolster availability, monitoring and support, and adopted LIMA Cloud for Disaster Recovery (DR) and Backup. Having weighed up the options around its primary infrastructure, the firm opted to retain its on-premise solution for the time being, with a plan to migrate their whole environment to LIMA Cloud over a period of time.
However, when Stephensons suffered an unavoidable and unexpected power outage to its on-premise kit, the case management system failed over to the LIMA Cloud DR service and the results were nothing short of remarkable.
The firm experienced a significant improvement in case management performance in comparison to the on-premise platform.
Chris Gath, then IT Director at Stephensons, said:
“We were so impressed by the effectiveness of LIMA’s cloud services, we made a strategic decision to move away from our traditional on-premise solution and embraced LIMA cloud wholeheartedly.”
“Downtime is no longer a concern and our services remain accessible around the clock. Most importantly, LIMA’s robust security measures safeguard our data and applications, so we rest easy knowing that our critical assets are protected.”
LIMA offers dedicated case management assessments for law firms, driving improvements such as:
- 383% improvement in system loading times
- Complex report generation more than 3x faster
- Availability and performance consistency even during peak times
- Average of 20 minutes saved per fee-earner, per day
Most recently, LIMA has supported Stephensons on its journey to implement a SaaS-based case management solution – ShareDo.
In partnership, Stephenson’s is now moving towards LIMA’s target operating model for IT in legal, with case management on a hosted solution, reducing infrastructure requirements and utilising Azure and Modern Workplace for a transformational user experience and maximum fee-earner efficiency.
The outcomes
Stephenson attributes its significant increase in resilience and operational stability to its partnership with LIMA.
The partnership has provided Stephensons with a high-performance platform for case management that's enabled the firm to improve fee earner efficiency and facilitated the journey towards SaaS-based applications, whilst delivering modern workplace capabilities to further improve user experience.
LIMA has delivered enhanced data security, data retention and platform resilience, with significantly reduced downtime.
“LIMA are more than a safe pair of hands. The maturity of their services means we have a predictable and reliable level of service when it comes to managing issues, and their understanding of the legal sector and of our business challenges gives them the ability to move beyond a service provider towards being a true strategic partner."
“The improvement in our case management performance has been remarkable, resulting in huge gains in the efficiency of our fee-earners. LIMA’s success is underpinned by their ability to work across multiple levels of their organisation, from managing partner to directors, into IT engineering staff.”
Chris Gath - IT Director, Stephensons
