Going hosted with Access Legal: A journey of success for Josiah Hincks

Stuart Wright, operations director at Josiah Hincks, says: “When we saw the IT support and integration with the DPS case management system, it was a no-brainer to go with Access Legal.”

Josiah Hincks is a Leicester-based law firm that has been practicing since 1927 – it has come on a long way since then, picking up the 2018 Leicestershire Law Society’s small law firm of the year award.

The firm decided to go for a fully integrated package of case management and legal accounts from Access Legal back in 2016 after seeing the products demonstrated at a national law exhibition in London. It was impressed by the integrated accounts system and the precedents already in the system and marked Access Legal out as one of the top systems it saw on the day.

One of the challenges for a modern law firm is managing growth. In the time between 2016 and 2020, Josiah Hincks had grown from three branches up to five branches across Leicestershire.

It was important for operations director Stuart Wright that the firm wasn’t spending its time managing its IT infrastructure when it could be better spending its time practicing law and serving its clients.

This inspired the move to go hosted, so that all its solutions are under one roof and supported by Access Legal’s support teams.

As part of Josiah Hincks IT development project in late 2019 many questions were asked internally about what was wanted and needed from its IT system. “Do we go into the cloud or upgrade our internal onsite server systems? Is the cloud safe? Do we have one provider for law case management and one for IT? Following a wide and deep review of our system upgrade options and potential IT providers, the cloud-based option came out on top for us.

“We did look at alternate cloud solutions, while staying with Access Legal, which would have been a marked improvement from where we were. However, when we saw the IT support and integration with the DPS case management system, it was a no-brainer.”

Stuart adds: “We’re not IT experts, we’re a law firm – so it was nice that we were able to gain confidence from the level of IT support that was being offered, in addition to the security of the cloud and GDPR compliance that came with being hosted by Access Legal.”

Support from Access Legal

One key advantage of going hosted with Access Legal and having the case management system in the cloud is that in addition to the support the firm receive from a relationship manager and client services, it also has three lines of technical support in the UK who can deal with any issues that crop up while fee earners are working remotely quickly and efficiently.

Stuart says: “In terms of dealing with our county-wide branch provision, having an IT provider with multiple layers of solutions in terms of technical support was an essential requirement, which was something that was not available with our previous provider.

“This additional IT support provided that level of reassurance we need as we grow the business.”

“We’ve found the IT support to be excellent, easy to use, friendly, professional and has a good response time. The team always solve any temporary issues that have popped up. And the support provided during migration to the cloud was exceptional, including the additional training provided.”

Mitigating the effect of Covid-19

The Covid-19 pandemic has caused disruption not only in the UK legal industry, but others across the world. While no one could prepare for such a global crisis, going hosted with Access Legal has meant that the transition to move all of Josiah Hincks staff to remote working has been quick and efficient.

“It has been incredibly easy; in the space of two days, we moved all 50 staff to home working. It wasn’t stressful for us in the slightest, we just picked up and went home. The system is there to enable remote working, the hard bit was transporting the hardware home.

“We were hardly down at all, and interestingly, the end of March was one of our most successful months.”

The level of support experienced during the pandemic has stayed the same as well, with Access Legal engineers ready to assist. And the IT team got hardware joined up to the hosted system so that fee earners could still print off their paperwork if they wished.

“Bar setting up a couple of printers at home, we’ve had no other real issues and have been able to concentrate on getting our jobs done. A key factor is why we chose DPS was that we want to focus on what we are good at (legal) and leave IT to the IT experts – Access Legal.”

A modern legal practice

Josiah Hincks is an example of a modern law firm in practice – able to continue its work from anywhere in the world with its case management and legal accounts all securely stored and accessible in the cloud. This is further supported by DPS Mobile, which allows users to access their file history (including documents and emails), add time and notes to a matter, dictate, and view reports all from their mobile.

“Initially, before our hosted environment, only one-third of those who dictated used DPS Mobile, now 100% do.”

“The reporting system, and the detail within it, has helped us monitor what is going on effectively. And we are seeing staff being more productive and progressing files very well during this unusual time.”

Access Legal provides a standard reporting package inside the case management system as well as ad-hoc queries and SSRS reports, which can be sent out to any member(s) of staff as a subscription service – so they receive reports as periodically as they like. In testing times such as these, being able to monitor the work that’s being done, and also cashflow, is important for keeping a law firm running as efficiently as possible. And this can be done easily with the Access Legal suite of reports.

Going hosted with Access Legal has proved to be a great decision for Josiah Hincks. All 50 of its users have been able to work from home at the drop of the hat, leaving their firm relatively unaffected when the Covid-19 crisis hit. But the firm has also benefited from first-class support and greater efficiencies from using the software in a hosted system.