How Sharmans’ seamless transition to Legl delivered efficient risk assessments and eradicated fee-earner frustration

Sharmans is a full-service law firm that has been serving clients in Bedford and Ampthill for centuries and prides itself on maintaining its incredibly high client satisfaction rating. The firm has long recognised the importance of completing thorough risk assessments at the outset of every file and has always ensured its fee-earners maintain proactive ownership of client and matter risk.

However, along with this level of diligence, came fee-earner frustration with what was still a very manual system for completing risk assessments, all compounded in a 9-page word document. The firm decided to find a better way, with a priority of making the process more efficient to give time and energy back to fee-earners.

Leading this effort is Mel Lawrence, Sharmans’ Senior Commercial Property Partner and MLRO. Alongside Gill, Sharmans’ firm-wide compliance officer, Mel took on the role of project lead for transforming how the firm approached risk assessments.

Working with Legl, Sharmans has significantly reduced the time spent on risk assessments, improved compliance oversight and shifted firm-wide attitudes towards ongoing risk monitoring. We spoke to Mel about why Sharmans made the change and the impact it’s had.

Before Legl: A long, static Word form draining fee-earner time

Before Legl, Sharmans relied on a Word-based risk assessment form that was completed on every new client and matter. The document ran to around nine pages, with no conditional logic or dynamic flow.

“Each risk assessment used to take us about an hour to complete for each file. We want all our fee-earners to take ownership of risk, but doing compliance work was taking up a lot of fee-earning time.”

Because the form was static, lawyers were required to work through every question regardless of relevance. This made the process laborious, frustrating, and difficult to fit naturally into the opening stages of a matter.

“It created a lot of frustration,” Mel says. “You want the team to be able to get into the substance of the work quickly, but risk assessments were draining their energy at the outset of the matter.”

On top of that, high-risk matters had to be manually logged and flagged to compliance, creating extra administrative effort and limited visibility.

Mel set out to make things easier for fee-earners and staff and give them time back, by finding a solution which would significantly improve the efficiency of risk assessments.

Finding Legl: Making fee-earners lives easier within weeks by streamlining risk assessments into a digital workflow

Sharmans worked with Legl to convert their existing risk assessment forms into a digital workflow within the Legl platform. One of the biggest wins was how easy it was for the firm to adopt. Fee-earners found Legl’s risk assessments so intuitive that they felt comfortable using them after just one short training session:

“We had a 30 minute training session and an internal call about how we wanted the team to use Legl and everyone was able to run with the platform straight away” Mel says. “It was a very easy transition.”

Mel was especially impressed by how easily Legl understood and adapted to the firm’s way of working, policies and risk appetite. Rather than requiring the firm to adjust, Legl reduced any concerns around change management or extra workload on her team to encourage adoption. Once the firms had shared its existing form with Legl, they had a working digital risk assessment driving efficiency within a few weeks.

“The speed and efficiency with which Legl understands how we work and what we need is excellent” Mel reports.

The Impact: 6x faster
From 1 risk assessment per hour to 3 in 20 minutes

The most immediate benefit was a dramatic reduction in time spent on risk assessments.

“Under our old system, one assessment could easily take around an hour,” Mel explains. “Using Legl, we can now complete three risk assessments in around twenty minutes.”

As well as seeing an instant ROI in the time savings and efficiency, Mel has also seen several other ways that Legl has helped the firm to improve its risk assessment process, including help shift the team’s mentality towards ongoing monitoring of risk:

“The diary function for updating risk assessments has been excellent. It has helped staff understand that we must review risk on an ongoing basis and ensure that this is being done,” Mel notes.

Legl Risk Assessments are also enabling senior partners to take faster decisions through better oversight of high-risk cases:

“The oversight Legl’s risk assessment gives you is great. High-risk matters are now automatically flagged to myself and Gill, then instantly discussed with the partners so a quick decision can be made on anything unusual. That has really helped me as MLRO.”

The Outcome: Time saved, better visibility and easy firm-wide buy-in

Since adopting Legl Risk Assessments, Sharmans has seen benefits across the board:

• Significant time savings for fee earners
• Positive staff feedback and smooth adoption
• Improved MLRO and compliance oversight of high-risk matters
• Reduced manual administration and clearer escalation paths
• Deliberate, consistent ongoing risk monitoring

Reflecting on the experience, Mel says:

“We really like the platform, it’s very easy to use and Legl’s team is so responsive. Legl so clearly understands the risk assessment process, what law firms need to go through and how to make our lives more efficient.”

Are you interested in the outcomes you could achieve with Legl's fast, efficient risk assessments? You can try our simple risk assessment opportunity calculator to find out what your firm could gain by digitising risk assessments, based on where you are today.