Slater & Gordon is not a typical law firm. The company is a legal services company for everyday families and individuals, with a strong emphasis on customer service. When people are going through a major life event — from selling a home to writing a will to dealing with life-changing personal injury — Slater & Gordon connects clients with legal experts ready to help them.

One of the ways Slater & Gordon achieves its strong customer service is by investing in technology to engage with clients conveniently and securely from anywhere, without needing to travel to an office. Clients can telephone, connect via web chat, submit online requests, or log into online platforms to check details about ongoing cases and claims.

Paper workflows are being replaced by secure, digital transactions using Adobe Document Cloud. Adobe Acrobat turns any type of document into a sharable, highly secure digital file. Adobe Acrobat Sign transforms entire workflows with electronic signatures, audit trails, and tracking with intuitive operations.

CTIO Jon Grainger created Slater & Gordon’s strong technology strategy around the following idea: Work Anywhere, Automate Everything & Innovate. “Our technology strategy builds upon the idea of connecting people to our company culture and colleagues in a meaningful and secure way,” says Grainger. “This includes any work setting: in the office, at home, or on the move.”

Creating smoother workflows for all employees

Slater & Gordon first focused on transforming manual tasks by investing heavily in new technological recipes for success. It upgraded all computers to Microsoft Managed Desktops that keep all user environments up to date, more secure, and highly available. Microsoft Teams helps keep employees connected, no matter where they’re working. Easy integration with Adobe Document Cloud expands Teams capabilities with simultaneous PDF review and electronic signatures delivered directly through the Teams interface.

One of the biggest roadblocks for most employees was paperwork. As a legal services business, every employee at Slater & Gordon manages a lot of paperwork every day. Whether taking time to print, organize, and mail documents or waiting for signed contracts to be returned, dealing with paperwork was a time-consuming reality of every employee’s day.

“Adobe Acrobat Sign is very popular with our lawyers, and we are now pushing it to be more integrated with our core case management platform,” notes Grainger.

Rapid client communication

Mobile-friendly signing with Adobe Acrobat Sign leads to faster document turnaround and higher case-flow velocity, allowing Slater & Gordon to efficiently handle more customers and cases. There are often situations where someone calls for advice on a critical legal matter. Adobe Acrobat Sign eliminates time spent printing and mailing documents for signature. Within minutes, an employee can send a standard contract to the caller. The caller can sign and return the contract in seconds through any mobile device for immediate onboarding as a new client.

“With Adobe Acrobat Sign, we get documents into the hands of clients quickly, while also making it easy for them to respond,” says Grainger. “Speed is very important in all consumer markets, but we can’t forget the importance of having an intuitive and convenient user experience as well.”

Slater & Gordon employees can easily handle the increase in clients and cases with the visibility Adobe Acrobat Sign adds through document tracking and audit trails. Lawyers can check the Adobe Acrobat Sign dashboard to see if clients have received proposals. If documents seem delayed, they can call clients to answer questions or send an automatic reminder to keep documents moving. Audit trails support compliance requirements by clearly recording who has interacted with a document. Signed documents are returned as PDF files ready for highly secure storage — no scanning or data entry required.

“By improving efficiency, Adobe Acrobat Sign gives employees the capacity to innovate and better serve customers,” says Grainger.

Stepping ahead during a pandemic

While Slater & Gordon started rolling out Adobe Acrobat Sign years ago, adoption boomed when the global pandemic mandated that employees work from home. The company held live events through Microsoft Teams to spread information about Adobe Acrobat Sign and get departments excited about potential use cases.

“We pivoted quickly because our Work Anywhere strategy was underway well before the pandemic,” says Grainger. “Adobe Acrobat Sign was critical for this new remote world. While we didn’t foresee the pandemic, we saw the competitive advantages of what work-from-anywhere technology could bring to our company.”

Adobe Acrobat Sign now handles dozens of use cases, processing around 13,300 documents per month. While Adobe Acrobat Sign delivers seamless workflows for client-facing documents, internally it is used extensively by compliance, finance, procurement, and many other departments. Slater & Gordon hopes to further expand adoption and efficiency by using the built-in integrations between Adobe Acrobat Sign and Microsoft Teams to create central hubs for internal document workflows.

“Further Adobe Acrobat Sign integrations are high on the agenda. This quarter we are embedding it even deeper into our case management system,” says Grainger. “Adobe Acrobat Sign is an essential part of digitizing the new consumer legal service customer experience. It’s clearly a technology enabler.”

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