“I would recommend other firms to look at Legl’s Risk Assessments product. It has evolved very quickly to respond to our needs as customers and provides a lot of flexibility to adapt to you and your firm. It allows firms to work in their own way. For staff, fee-earners and for me as MLRO, it’s made things much easier all round.”

Helen Strachan, Practice Director & MLRO, Burnett & Reid

Burnett & Reid is one of Scotland’s longest-established law firms with 100s of years experience guiding clients through a diverse range of property, business and personal matters from their offices in Aberdeen. Burnett & Reid puts significant effort into assessing and managing risk across all the work that they do. 

This is where Practice Director and MLRO, Helen Strachan comes in. Helen is responsible for ensuring Burnett & Reid complies with anti-money laundering (AML) regulations and for shaping the policies and processes that keep the firm compliant and protected against fraud. As Helen puts it: “I wear a lot of hats!”

Working with Legl, Helen is now transforming Burnett & Reid’s approach to Risk Assessments, to ensure that the firm can approach risk efficiently, consistently and strategically. We spoke to her about why and how she did it:

Where we started: An inconsistent approach using a manual template

Like many firms, Burnett & Reid started their risk assessment journey with the Law Society’s template, adapting it over time to reflect their own policies. The process was time consuming, but the firm had robust risk policies in place and staff were being diligent carrying out risk assessments on new work.

The inflection point happened when the firm participated in an inspection by the Law Society. The results validated the effort the firm was putting into risk assessments but also revealed a key area for improvement: inconsistency.

The search for solutions begins: Struggles to balance policy and efficiency

Helen responded to this by creating a spreadsheet based form with some built-in risk logic, in an effort to secure a policy aligned approach to risk. While this improved consistency, it came with downsides:

• “It was slow for fee-earners” because the form was not dynamic to the type of client or matter, fee earners were asked to answer a lot of irrelevant questions, leading to wasted time and lots of “n/a” entries.
  
  
• “It was hard to see where the high risks were across the firm” because Helen had to rely on staff manually flagging high-risk matters to her. “This was making it very difficult for me to get a confident sense of how much risk we were taking on overall as a firm.”

Reflecting on that early attempt to solve the problem, Helen says: “I knew it was never ideal - it needed to be more dynamic…” 

Finding Legl: Transforming a static form into a dynamic, digital workflow

Helen turned to Legl to digitise the firm’s risk assessment model. She worked closely with the Legl team to create a template in the platform that was tailored to the firm’s specific policies and risk appetite.  

“A key problem Legl solved for us was making the form dynamic,” Helen says. “Now the form only asks fee-earners the questions that are relevant to their client or matter (no more N/As!) and it also gives us the ability to auto-calculate risk according to our policy on the answers given.”

In complimenting her personal goals and objectives as an MLRO, Helen highlights how Legl auto-escalates high risk assessments directly to her as a game changer: 

An improved approach to evolving risk and one, regulator-ready audit trail

The Legl Risk Assessment is also enabling Helen’s team to evolve their view of risk more effectively. For cases involving elements that are inherently high risk according to policy (e.g. cash-only property transactions) automated risk-scoring is ensuring that initial high-risk rating is on file. However, if the team has additional information that shows the risk is lower, Legl allows permitted users to adjust the rating, record why it changed and still retain a full record of how their evaluation of risk evolved at each step.

“We can act much more appropriately to risk. We can quickly see when additional enhanced due diligence or source of wealth checks might be needed, but we can also avoid overdoing things when the additional information we have shows that residual risk is actually lower.”

This is all giving Helen much more control and oversight of how decisions are being made on risk. And should an inspection come calling again, Helen feels confident that the firm will see even better results.

The outcome: Efficiency, firm-wide visibility, and strategic insight

After a few months of switching Burnett & Reid’s risk assessment process to Legl, the benefits have been felt across the firm:

Faster and more efficient for fee-earners and staff:

“For lawyers, it’s the speed that has won them over. In the past it took them 7-10 minutes to do the form and fill out the initial questions, whereas now it takes people 1-2 minutes.”

Confidence and control for the compliance team:

“I have more comfort that I know exactly where we are with firm-wide risk and I am able to prove my conclusions based on the overall view I get in the platform of how many high risk clients or matters we are working with at any given time.”

Exciting strategic value to unlock for the future:

“In the future Legl will give us great power of information on what is driving our risk to make strategic decisions about our risk appetite. It will help us understand what we need to look at differently in terms of deciding whether as a firm, we want to take on those risks or not and whether commercially it makes sense for us to take on the due diligence we need to do on certain types of clients or matters.”

Are you interested in improving how your firm approaches managing risk? Book a call with our team today and we’ll show you how Legl can transform your approach to Risk Assessments. Get in touch!