Mediation

There is no better experience than being “thrown in at the deep end”.

My first experience with P4W and indeed a law firm was to implement a solution in P4W for a busy Mediation Team.

The existing, purpose built, system had been designed and built for the firm and was developed using Microsoft Access and had many documents, 127, that were used.

There were several challenges that I faced:

1. Learn P4W
2. Understand Mediation
3. Replicate / improve the existing system
4. Overcome the, natural, resistance to change
5. Develop a migration plan
6. Address training issues

I discovered that having no previous knowledge of P4W, or any other legal systems, proved to be an advantage as I have no preconceived ideas of how things should be done.

I adopted my standard approach what I call the WHY question:

• What do you do?
• How do you do it?
• whY do you do it?

Once that discovery process is complete, I can then reverse the process:

• I understand whY things are done
• How can I improve the process
• What can we do to simplify the working practice.

The current system relied upon the Legal Assistants knowledge of which documents to use based upon events in the Mediation process, so if conditions a, b and c existed then use document 45, if a, f, and m existed then document 98.

Often the documents were variants of each other where the Legal Assistant then deleted certain paragraphs.

P4W has an excellent feature where you can insert into a document other sub documents, and these sub documents could be dynamically chosen based on conditional logic. So, the above reliance upon the Legal Assistants knowledge could be replicated and removed.

Mediation follows a logical process, and this allowed for the design of a new solution that could be used to guide the Fee Earners and Legal Assistants through it.

Mediation is unique within law firms in that the Mediator represents both clients, where “normal” law the lawyer represents their client and communicates with the other sides client.

It also has the interesting position that the clients funding can be private, legal aid or mixed. This provided me a solution and more challenges. Fortunately, my lack of knowledge of P4W meant I found the solution for this designed by Tikit. There was only one issue which would come out later. The internal solution for having two parties was only accessible if the funding for the Matter was legal aid. This was not an issue initially and meant I was using the internal structure for recording certain statuses for the Matter.

It is the Fee Earners who determine the statuses for all the settings, and these can be “buried” in sub menus and sub forms. Having the Fee Earners remember these or instructing the Legal Assistants is inefficient. I decided to produce a solution that meant we kept all the work being done inside the Matter. I used the Question and Answer feature the P4W has within its Precedents to record these statuses and then use the SQL feature with P4W to set these within the database.

There was one exception to this, this was the assessment for Legal Aid eligibility. The previous system allowed a CW5 form to be completed by the Fee Earner who then manually calculated the results. On our intranet I produced a data driven form for capturing the data and then calculating the outcome in the background. The result was presented to the Fee Earner and the eligibility was set automatically and then the CW5 form was generated for the client to sign.

I mentioned that Mediation follows a logical process, but I did not want to force the Fee Earners to perform mundane manual tasks to add Agendas. I used a specific type of Precedent, Free Style step, to ask them about progress.

Let me go into some detail. The first stage of Mediation is the Intake where contact is made with the two parties and when they agree to proceed, they are assessed, so in the Intake agenda was a Free Style step that asked if they were proceeding or not proceeding. Subject to the answer either a MIAM (assessment) or Not Proceeding Agenda is added to the Matter with required documents. The assessment process again had a Free Style step to ask if they would be proceeding to Sessions or Not Proceeding, Session or Not Proceeding Agendas added accordingly. In Session there is another Free Style step that asked a further question, now with 3 answers: another session, not proceeding, or success. Another session added more precedents for the next session and a new Free Style step. Not proceeding and success added the appropriate Agenda. Appropriate closing precedents for not proceeding and success (agreement reached) are in the Agendas for completion. Just one twist in Not proceeding was a Free Style step for restarting the process to where it has stopped.

Important: Apart from post session documents that contain information specific to that Matter every other document is produced based on the statuses recorded and needed NO editing by the Legal Assistants.

Billing.

Mediation is billed by 3 methods, private, Legal Aid or a mix.

In the existing system multiple bill documents were available for MIAM, Session and outcome billing for private and Legal Aid. These were produced and sent to the accounts department to record the billing inside P4W ledgers.

Private billing is fixed price, and we were able to replace the many bills with a single bill precedent which knew what work had been done and billed appropriately. The bill was produced, and the Fee Earner could record how the bill was or was not paid. This bill creation performed the relevant ledger processing.

There was one behind the scenes twist which I eluded too before. To access to the Mediation parties recording needed the Matter to be set funding as Legal Aid. The P4W [BILL:] command used in the private bill would not work for Legal Aid cases. The solution to this was to use the Question and Answer process, which can be automated, to flip the funding from LA to private, run the [BILL:] command and flip it back afterwards.

Legal Aid billing is done through Billing Wizard, which needed some manual processing but was straightforward, this then meant the LA claim process could be performed from P4W and submitted. This eliminated the previous systems need to generate a proforma bill for Accounts.

I have spoken to one other firm that has used P4W for Mediation. They had not adopted the above and had to use two matters if one party was private and the other was Legal Aid funded.

There was one objective I set at the beginning of the development when I realised how the process could prompt the Fee Earners and Legal Assistants. That objective was to produce a system where “we could take someone off the street, give them basic training and rapidly they would be working”. I got very close to this when someone transferred from conveyancing to Mediation, so they had basic knowledge of P4W but no knowledge of Mediation, they were up and running after a one-hour demonstration of the system.

Second Generation. The initial version needed the two parties to be added as Entities and then the Legal Assistant would need to do access the Legal Aid section of P4W when creating the matter. The second generation did this behind the scenes so that I achieved the process of having everything done from inside the Matter, except the CW5 production and LA Billing / claiming.

The migration plan, in this case was to, at a set date, produce new Matters in P4W and complete existing ones in the original system. It would be clear which were in the old system in case it needed to be referred to, but this is rare and only for complaints.

Benefits

• Process knowledge was not needed – it was prompted
• User worked just inside the Matter
• Training time dramatically reduced
• No need for editing “standard” documents
• Legal Assistants could spend more time dealing with clients, better service
• The department could deal with more Matters improving profits
• Only one Matter was required for any funding method