It’s been a long and at times rocky road, but national full-service law firm, Blake Morgan has successfully consolidated all of its practice management systems into Peppermint CX, creating a single view of the client and removing the need for multiple records in multiple systems.
The move follows the announcement in March last year that the Portsmouth-headquartered law firm had completed the first phase of its transition to the Peppermint platform as part of a two year project.
As of last year, staff have had a single time recording tool, method of billing and approach to closure and archiving of matters. The client matter inception has also been developed to provide an end to end process that captures the information required by their legal teams and also provide the basis for the firm to utilise the built in CRM database capabilities in Peppermint in the future.
This second phase of the project, the upgrade to Peppermint CX, appears to have happened on time and to schedule, with staff moving to the consolidated PMS in May.
Blake Morgan signed up with Peppermint in 2013 (then Blake Lapthorn, pre merger with Morgan Cole and subsequent merger with Piper Smith Watton.)
As of 2017 it had still yet to begin full user acceptance testing and speaking to Legal IT Insider that year, Peppermint founder Arlene Adams admitted that the circa 700-staff firm had suffered from Peppermint’s early inexperience in the sector, commenting: “We are small and learning and investing heavily in scale – we don’t have all the answers from the outset.”
Blake Morgan’s go-live is symbolic of a significant turn of fortune for Peppermint, which in January received a £7m funding injection from existing investor Scottish Equity Partners and new investor Accel-KKR. As we revealed this week, the Nottingham-headquartered company has hired Matt O’Callaghan from Microsoft in a major vote of confidence in its technology, and is regaining the confidence of the market having invested in an experienced C-Suite led by CEO Gary Young.
In December Microsoft said that Peppermint Technology has “shifted gears” following the launch earlier in 2018 of a Dynamics 365 public cloud customer relationship management system that is gaining the interest of Microsoft’s larger enterprise clients. And in May, Carey Olsen said that it is ‘on the start of the Peppermint journey’ including looking at Peppermint’s practice management system and other offerings after a successful business development CRM solution implementation across its nine offices.
“This is the first time we have been on a single system within Blake Morgan,” said managing partner Mike Wilson. “Moving everyone onto a single practice management system is the foundation that drives consolidation and enables our legal teams to work in a consistent manner across the firm.”
The move onto Peppermint has also provided the opportunity for Blake Morgan to review its working practices and create further efficiencies for example through the removal of online transaction requisitions.
“When we took a closer look at finance workflows, we were able to drive significant efficiencies through automation of steps that were previously manual. We’ve really started to challenge ourselves around the touch-points and focus efforts on actions that are truly value-add,” said finance director Matthew Clarke.
Following consolidation of their practice management systems onto the Peppermint platform, Blake Morgan can now switch their focus to continuous improvement and opportunities to enhance client experience.
Wilson said: “We see that Peppermint can offer real value in helping us get the most out of the relationships we have with clients. Our next phase will focus on implementation of the capabilities within Peppermint CX beyond those of standard PMS systems in order to enhance our client facing capabilities.”
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