Although lateral hiring and onboarding workflows vary significantly across law firms, most of these processes share one thing in common: they’re hampered by an inability to quickly capture data. As firms face the most active period of lateral lawyer movement in history, firm leaders must consider investing in technology that can help them create faster, more seamless processes that also protect them from potential conflicts.
“This is no longer time to wing it,” warned Bryn Bowen, Practice Group Lead for Legal Risk at Intapp. “Firms need to have a consistent, sensible, and holistic solution.”
During a recent Intapp Risk & Compliance product briefing, “Expediting Lateral Hiring: Integrated Onboarding and Conflicts Clearance,” Bowen explored the current lateral-related challenges facing risk and compliance teams, and demonstrated how solutions like Intapp Intake and Intapp Conflicts can help firms easily and securely onboard new candidates.
Evaluating Risk and Improving Decision-Making
During a poll, a majority of the webinar attendees reported that their firm’s onboarding success rate had been negatively impacted because of lengthy workflows. Additionally, as Bowen revealed, risk and compliance teams are facing increasing pressures concerning firm expansion, finances, strategic alignment, complex regulations, and client demands. Bowen explained that, without the proper technology to holistically evaluate risk and onboard laterals, firms will soon find themselves overwhelmed.
“Beyond analyzing whether a firm can take on the business [that lateral bring with them], firms are actually starting to assess whether they should take on the business,” said Bowen. “To make these decisions, firms need to communicate effectively, with all relevant background information at hand. The need to onboard these laterals quickly, efficiently, and in a compliant matter compounds the stress.”
To expedite lateral hiring, firms need an integrated, AI-assisted conflicts management workflow — and Intapp can provide the technology to make this possible. Firms can invest in a prebuilt, configurable workflow within Intapp Intake, or work directly with Intapp to build a custom intake form.
“We’ve worked with our clients to develop a solution based on best practices across the industry,” said Bowen. “The lateral hire solution is an out-of-the-box, low-impact, implementation-friendly tool for efficiently evaluating and onboarding laterals. Our lateral hire clearance solution provides … a central place for all the firm’s internal stakeholders and decision-makers to view and evaluate the full package of information.”
Simplifying Processes and Securing Data
The Intapp Risk & Compliance suite — which consists of Intapp Intake, Intapp Conflicts, Intapp Terms, and Intapp Walls — leverages AI, machine learning, and predictive analytics to deliver better lateral onboarding. The suite helps firms tackle a number of lateral onboarding tasks:
- Accelerating business acceptance and conflicts clearance to start billing sooner
- Gaining better insights to make more strategic, lower-risk decisions
- Avoiding reputational and financial damage with ongoing risk monitoring
- Satisfying clients while improving realization and profitability
Kristian Uggla, Senior Sales Engineer at Intapp, demonstrated the lateral onboarding features of Intapp Risk & Compliance during the webinar, explaining how the software relies on an external tenant within the cloud, regardless of whether a firm uses a cloud-based or on-premises system.
“The tenant is independent of your environment, allowing you to invite external users to come in, fill out a form, and give you the information required,” said Uggla. “It will go through integration points and push that data into your environment. External users will feel like they’re in your environment, but they will in fact have no access to your information whatsoever.”
In addition to being more secure than manual processes, the lateral onboarding features of Intapp Risk & Compliance are easy for both internal and external users, especially when it comes to filling out forms. “Nothing will be lost, regardless of whether someone accidentally closes the browser window or let it time out,” Uggla said. “The form will still gather all that data.”
Uggla demonstrated an example form that included numerous fields for lateral partners to complete, including matters and clients those partners may have historically engaged with or plan to bring along. Uggla then showed how the collected data integrates with a firm’s system, and how that information is displayed.
“The information that the lateral partners filled out flows into your environment … and your users have the ability to review the form,” Uggla said. “If there’s information that’s missing — such as the descriptions for the matters — you actually can push this form back out to that lateral and the external environment with your comments.”
Risk and compliance teams can also leverage the lateral onboarding features of Intapp Risk & Compliance to help speed up the conflicts search process, letting them launch matters more quickly than ever before. Users can enforce barriers and ethical walls across their connected systems, and manage ethical screens required during lateral hires.
Watch the full product briefing to learn how Intapp Risk & Compliance can support your risk and compliance teams and improve your lateral hiring process, or schedule a demo.