Three ways to keep your client’s sensitive data secure

The security of client data should be your number one priority. Most individuals won’t even consider hiring a law firm if they don’t feel confident their details will be properly secured.

The regulatory requirements with regards to data are another incentive to ensuring everything is managed correctly. With the introduction of GDPR, it’s more important than ever to handle data in the right way.

There are a number of ways in which data can be compromised. It can happen maliciously, where a hacker or fraudster is looking to breach your systems and steal sensitive information – probably for financial gain.

It can also happen accidentally. Human error is a part of life, and it’s not uncommon for an email to mistakenly be sent to the wrong person – an email that contains data that should not be shared with anyone other than the intended recipients.

Neither of these scenarios are completely unavoidable. But you can mitigate the risk by taking reason steps to maintain the trust of your clients, and reduce the chance of fines and other punishments by regulators.

So, what can you do?

Your Case Management software is where your client’s data is going to be stored. So you need a solution that provides suitable security, and makes it easier for you to stay on the right side of the regulations.

Meet GDPR requirements

Proclaim features two GDPR toolsets that assist you in remaining compliant. They are the GDPR Information Asset Register, and the GDPR Individual Rights Workflow.

The Asset Register acts as a map for all the data you hold. It allows you to track where information is stored, and helps you understand why you have it and what it is being used for.

The Individual Rights workflow manages GDPR requests such as the Right to be Forgotten from individuals whose data you hold, allowing you to respond to their requests in a simple and efficient manner within the regulatory time limits. Only authorised users can access this information. And it issues on screen alerts to flag potential non-compliance matters.

Ring-fence data securely in the cloud

Whilst you can host Proclaim on your own systems, Proclaim can also live happily in any secure UK based ISO accredited data centre, meaning data is never held on users devices. This makes it easy to control who has access to client information and means misplaced laptops are not the severe data breach they once were.

Your entire Proclaim database is regularly backed up automatically, so should a disaster strike your offices you can be back concentrating on client care in no time, accessing Proclaim from any location.

Send and receive sensitive data in encrypted emails

One of the newer features of Proclaim is the integration with RMail, which allows you to send encrypted emails to clients.
This means if an email gets intercepted, no data will be at risk because only the intended recipient can see the contents of that email – including any attachments.

It works through Outlook, so there’s no additional effort required from the sender. There’s a simple button you can press to ‘encrypt’ any email and then send it directly through Proclaim. Your recipients can even reply to the encrypted email in a secure encrypted portal.

You can also see when the email has been read by the recipient, which acts as proof of delivery – admissible as evidence in a court of law.

If security is important to you – and it should be – then Proclaim is the obvious choice as a Case Management solution.

You can find out more about this software by requesting a no obligation demonstration. Just visit this page.

Embracing app technology

Darren Gower (pictured), Marketing Director at Eclipse spoke with Legal Practice Management magazine to discuss why law firms shouldn’t think that, just because they’re operating in a traditional working environment, they’ve missed their chance to adapt.

If we’re honest, the legal sector has never been particularly quick to adopt new technologies. Traditional ways of working have always served us well in the past, so why change anything?

Well, the answer is because we can always get better. There’s always a new way to improve the level of service that law firms can offer their customers, and it’s often done through technology.

Digital technologies in particular have a big impact on businesses because they’re able to boost efficiencies. They can cut down time-consuming tasks into more manageable jobs, enabling more time to be spent on other areas of the business.

But it’s not just about embracing technologies that allow your fee earners to be more productive. You can also put these solutions into the hands of your customer – not only creating a better experience for them – but a more exciting one.

And the way to do that is through apps. Most people have a smartphone or a tablet and are used to using apps on a daily basis for a variety of things – from online banking and shopping, to browsing social media and reading the news.

The ability for them to communicate with their legal team through a simple, easy-to-use app –available 24/7 – is a huge benefit. They can view information about their case anytime without having to pick up the phone or send an email and wait for a response.

Certain apps used by law firms provide real time information, so users know that it’s completely accurate and up to date.

This additional value will encourage people to pay for and retain your services. You have to ask yourself what you can do that other law firms can’t. Using new technology is a great way of gaining an edge on your competitors.

Other firms are already providing these services – so you might be the one being left behind and losing that edge. The more quickly you implement apps and other process improvement features, the more you will benefit.

But it’s never too late. Don’t think that just because you’re operating in a traditional working environment, that you’ve missed your chance to adapt, and are behind everyone else.

Apps are going to be a bigger and bigger part of our lives in the coming years. Every day that goes by without you offering these powerful tools is another day that your competitors are gaining an edge.

RIAA Barker Gillette (UK) selects Proclaim Practice Management solution from Eclipse

RIAA Barker Gillette (UK) LLP is implementing Eclipse’s Practice Management solution, Proclaim, the Law Society Endorsed legal software provider.

Established in 1981, the West End law firm is part of the RIAA Barker Gillette Global Alliance, with affiliated offices from New York to Beijing. The firm boasts a leading reputation for the approachability and accessibility of its Partners and offers a highly personalised service. The firm provides a wealth of specialist services, including corporate and commercial, dispute resolution, employment, family, private client and real estate.

As a mid-tier law firm offering a wide range of services, RIAA Barker Gillette (UK) required a solution that could be rolled out across all departments enabling maximum efficiency. Proclaim’s compliance features and integrated document management and accounting systems made it the ideal choice of software.

TouchPoint+, Proclaim’s self-service portal, includes an app that allows the firm’s clients to access information from their mobile devices. This will help RIAA Barker Gillette (UK) to further enhance its position as a leading law firm providing outstanding client care.

Alex Deal (pictured), Managing Partner, of RIAA Barker Gillette (UK), comments:

“We’re delighted to be moving to the Proclaim platform – we’re confident the new system will have a massive impact on efficiency within our business. Proclaim’s flexibility impressed us and will enable us to integrate with our preferred software providers for postcode look-ups, digital dictation and ID/AML checks, making the transition to a new Practice Management system even smoother for both our clients and our team.”

Saving money with GDPR

Darren Gower (pictured), Marketing Director at Eclipse spoke to LPM Magazine to discuss how law firms should be efficiently handling GDPR regulations.

A year on from the introduction of GDPR, and adhering to its policies has never been more important than it is today. Not just from a compliance perspective – and being compliant will save you from being issued with fines – but in terms of the security of your law firm.

Research recently unveiled by the government shows that GDPR has, at least in part, contributed to the decline in cyber attacks against businesses in the UK. In fact, the number of companies who have experienced some sort of breach or attack went down from 43 percent to 32 percent.

According to the government’s report, each cyber security “breach” or “incident” costs large businesses an average of £22,700. So GDPR is a cost-saving exercise in more ways than one – it can prevent you from being fined and protect you from malicious attacks.

GDPR compliance pleases the regulators, it’s good for your clients, and it also has a positive effect on your bottom line. Which is why it’s so surprising that many firms don’t have efficient systems and processes in place to ensure everything is above board.

Sure, your business may not have violated any rules as of yet, but without a suitable plan of action for handling data, and dealing with Subject Access Requests, you could be walking on a tightrope.

It only takes one failure for the regulators to step in and start issuing penalties.

Implementing an entirely new system, or modifying the one you have, might be an expense you’re not particularly happy about paying. But it will undoubtedly save you money in the long run. An efficient, modernised organisational structure can make all the difference.

That means centralising all your data, rather than having it spread out across various platforms throughout your business. Effective search tools will enable you to comply with those Subject Access Requests in a timely manner, and discard appropriate data as and when necessary, to avoid being pulled up by the regulator.

Whilst a base system that improves efficiency across the board will enable firms to better comply with GDPR, there are more specific solutions available, built in a more bespoke manner particularly for this area of compliance.

Workflow systems dedicated to Subject Access Requests, or the individual rights of users as established by GDPR, can maximise efficiency even further, and ensure you’re doing everything you can to save money for your business.

Likewise, there is more you can (and should) be doing to reduce your risk against cyber attacks than simply adhering to GDPR. And the government’s report acknowledged as much. Many SMEs do not have cyber security policies in place and have not engaged in any formal cyber security training.

So when you do implement those systems and processes that will allow you to comply with GDPR, and therefore potentially save on costs, it’s essential firms look into what else they can be doing to ensure all their data is safe. It keeps the regulator happy, and it keeps your clients happy.

The Eclipse Proclaim Modern Law Awards 2020 – nominations open!

The Eclipse Proclaim Modern Law Awards are taking place at the Victoria Warehouse, Manchester on 6th February 2020.

We are delighted to be headline sponsor of the event, and to announce that nominations are now open!

The awards will provide the perfect opportunity for firms and individuals to showcase and set benchmarks for best practice in the ever diverse, challenging and exciting landscape for the business of law.

Click here to enter your submission before 15th November – and don’t forget you can nominate yourself!

How Proclaim Case Management powers Auxillis, the UK’s leading accident assistance provider

Part of £589.7m turnover support services provider, Redde plc, Auxillis is the UK’s leading provider of accident assistance services to drivers involved in non-fault accidents.

Launched in 1992, Auxillis now employs over 1,400 people across 2 operations centres and 27 branches, offering a range of services including credit hire, credit repairs, managed repairs and claims management services.

Almost 600 Auxillis staff use the Proclaim Case Management system. CIO, Andrew Langford (pictured), talks us through his experience of Proclaim.

Why Proclaim?

In 2009 Redde plc took the decision to merge three separate operating businesses to streamline our operations and remove the IT duplications that a series of company acquisitions had brought us.

Across the three businesses that dealt with claims management and hire services, we had a grand total of five separate software systems.

This was far from an ideal position, providing multiple points of data entry (difficult to control quality), multiple ways of working (making internal training long-winded and expensive) and a lot of duplication of effort in terms of moving and manipulating data between five places.

One business had been successfully using Proclaim since early 2001 (with over 300 concurrent users). It been tried and tested, and we saw it as having the most functionality and flexibility when it came to our plans for service expansion.

An in-depth systems assessment was carried out, to determine which system was the best fit for Auxillis moving forward. Using productivity benchmarking tests, Auxillis Operations Director, Susan Howe, found the business using Proclaim was the most efficient of the three businesses. This ultimately sealed our decision to roll out Proclaim as a replacement for the other systems.

The system transfer project was completed in July 2010 and saw a total of nearly 600 Auxillis employees using Proclaim.

Providing an end-to-end solution

Proclaim is used to support the full end-to-end accident management and vehicle hire process. The system gives us a holistic approach to case management – one integrated and consistent way of processing files, and one core data repository meaning a truly centralised approach.

Data integrity, and the resultant management information we can extract, are both of huge importance to Auxillis. Proclaim enables us to accurately analyse performance in real-time, and extract precisely what we need from the system. Nothing is ‘lost in translation’, and there is no need for guesswork or leaps of faith.

Given that we are controlling outsourced services from major financial services organisations and insurers, the confidence Proclaim gives us in our figures is invaluable.

Secure, robust and flexible

Given our scale and our fluid operational requirements, system resilience is vital. To aid our development team, we run three environments internally; the live one, a development area, and a test area.

These three sections are perfectly in tune, and the setup allows us to have a ‘sandbox’ creative attitude to system design which will not impact upon our live systems should we change our plans.

This helps us to be extremely reactive to business requirements and quickly deploy bespoke screens, fields and workflow steps.

We recently started to use Proclaim’s Web Services functionality to support full, real-time integration with our core business partners, using Microsoft BizTalk as a messaging layer. This will provide us with a deeper level of (fully reliable) real-time interactive intra-system messaging.

For overall system resilience, we utilise the ‘OpenEdge Replication’ toolset, which provides fast and accurate failover, should disaster strike. In fact, we have managed to create a strategy that will enable us to be up and running – all 600 users – just 10 minutes after an event that renders our primary systems inactive.

The benefits

Our Operations Director, Susan Howe, rightly places great emphasis on the ability to induct new employees quickly. Proclaim provides an extremely familiar Windows environment and ‘look and feel’, meaning that new users buy in to the system very quickly.

This continues when they find that Proclaim is genuinely straightforward to use, and as a result training is blissfully cost-effective for us. We can run sessions internally without the need to bring in external assistance.

Proclaim enables us to seamlessly link with case referrers to automatically import cases and updated details. The time savings here are immense – data inputting is made redundant, and mistakes (the ‘human factor’!) are greatly reduced. This makes for much closer and more valuable business relationships, reducing waste and frictional activity.

In addition, we use Eclipse’s FileView and SecureDocs tools to support our online Hire Agreement process, giving our customers the ability to electronically sign their rental agreements. Again, this streamlines our processes immensely and speeds up our overall service offering.

Following detailed internal analysis, we are actually able to put a figure to the productivity gains we see using Proclaim. We estimate that the system has reduced our ‘cost per case’ by approximately 20%. Considering the volumes we put through the system, that adds up to one very large annual cost saving.

The decision to standardise on Proclaim as our overall claims management platform has been truly validated. The system is by some distance the leader in the claims sector.

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Scottish start-up firm Teepee selects Proclaim Case Management solution from Eclipse

Start-up motor claims specialist Teepee is implementing Proclaim, the Case Management Software solution from Eclipse, a Law Society Endorsed legal software provider.

Established in 2019, the Glasgow-based firm specialises in motor claims; arranging repairs and credit hire through strong relationships with partner agencies that also utilise Proclaim. Proclaim will enable Teepee to operate with a high level of efficiency from day one.

As a new firm, Teepee requires a solution that will facilitate growth of the business – by establishing efficient processes for managing claims that ensure greater profit margins. Staff will benefit from this additional efficiency that permits them to focus on new business opportunities.

Proclaim’s self-service portal TouchPoint+ which includes an app that allows clients to access case information from their smartphone or tablet – will allow Teepee to differentiate from the established competition with increased levels of client care.

Tony Parris, Managing Director of Teepee, comments:

“Proclaim is going to be a game-changer for our firm – it’s exactly what we’ve been looking for. The flexibility it provides will really enable us to get the most out of this software, so we can concentrate on delivering a great service to our clients.

“TouchPoint+ in particular is going to be very well-received by our clients. The ability to keep them up to date in real time will help to create a smooth client journey during what can often be a stressful time.”