How Lane Powell centralizes new business acceptance with Intapp Walls

Intapp has enabled Lane Powell to centralize conflicts management, resulting in most conflicts to be cleared in an hour. The centralized model reduces risk by enforcing consistency and more robust conflicts analysis. The firm is further reducing risk by using Intapp Walls to enforce ethical barriers across a variety of systems.

A multi-specialty law firm, Lane Powell PC has helped emerging and established businesses navigate the Pacific Northwest and beyond for more than 140 years. Lane Powell has almost 200 lawyers across offices in Seattle, Portland and Anchorage.

Move to Centralized Conflicts Clearance

Lane Powell, recognized as “Northwest Firm of the Year” by Benchmark Litigation for 2018, prides itself on its innovation and entrepreneurial spirit. In reviewing its internal processes, the firm identified tremendous potential in modernizing and digitizing its approach to new business intake.

Lane Powell was previously using Elite for conflicts, but found that the technology did not fully support operational or risk requirements. The process was heavily paper-based, slow and quite inefficient overall. “To clear conflicts, attorneys would have to sort through long, poorly formatted paper reports,” recalls Conflicts Counsel BrittaLisa Gess. Lawyers spent too much time on administrative tasks, instead of working on revenue generating activities.

Furthermore, Lane Powell recognized that lawyers were not always well suited to clear their own conflicts. “Individual lawyers do not always have the expertise or access to the right information to make sound, consistent decisions on new business,” Gess explains. “Many of them want to make the right calls when it comes to conflicts; they just cannot do that consistently from a decentralized perspective.”

In line with the firm’s commitment to excellence and innovation, Lane Powell moved to a centralized model for new business acceptance to reduce its exposure to risk. It selected Intapp Intake, Intapp Conflicts, and Intapp Walls to support the transformation.

While lawyers are still able to view requests and dispositions, legal assistants are the main users to initiate the process. The centralized team analyzes the conflicts and recommends risk mitigation strategies when appropriate. Intapp Walls helps to mitigate certain types of conflicts by offering a barrier between groups.

Lane Powell selected Intapp in large part due to Intapp’s deep technical and legal expertise. “Unlike other vendors, Intapp does not focus just on the technical aspects. They know how the legal market works and understand our challenges,” adds Gess.

Core to our selection of Intapp was its ability to support the centralized model. The robust workflows and transparency offered by Intapp enabled our transformation.

BRITTALISA GESS, CONFLICTS COUNSEL, LANE POWELL

Business Impact of Centralizing Conflicts

Lane Powell has seen tangible improvements across a variety of vectors for new business acceptance. First, Lane Powell now sees most requests cleared in an hour. This accelerated responsiveness has contributed to improved client service, revenue growth and margin. By spending less time on conflict clearance, lawyers can deliver services to their clients faster and focus on revenue-generating activities. Administrative costs have been reduced significantly, enhancing the firm’s profitability over time.

Another clear benefit is around managing risk and regulatory compliance. “With a centralized conflict clearance model supported by Intapp, Lane Powell offers more consistent, robust conflict analysis. This lowers our overall risk,” explains Gess. Lane Powell leverages Intapp integration with Bureau van Dijk for corporate tree structure evaluation, which helps identify complex conflicts, and enables robust client due diligence (CDD) and enhanced due diligence (EDD). Intapp helps to streamline Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) compliance by automating the review process and keeping an audit trail for future reference.

Intapp Walls helps with conflicts management by enforcing barriers that need to be implemented. “Intapp Walls’ ease of use enables our team to create a wall, whether exclusionary or inclusionary, quickly. It enforces ethical walls across a variety of our systems, including Intapp Time,” adds Gess.

Executive Summary

Lane Powell PC, a multi-specialty law firm with almost 200 lawyers across offices in Seattle, Portland and Anchorage, is using Intapp Intake, Intapp Conflicts and Intapp Walls to centralize new business acceptance.

Challenges

  • Administrative costs of clearing conflicts using Elite were too high
  • Decentralized conflicts clearance process required lawyers to review long paper reports
  • Process was slow and inefficient

Results with Intapp

  • Successful move to a centralized model for conflicts clearance
  • Most conflicts requests resolved in an hour, enabling lawyers to start billable work faster
  • Reduction in administrative costs contributes to improved firm profitability over time
  • Lawyers now focused on client service, not clearing conflicts
  • More robust conflicts analysis and enhanced AML/KYC compliance, lowering overall risk
  • Streamlined evaluation of complex conflicts via Intapp integration with Bureau van Dijk
  • Ethical barriers enforced using Intapp Walls

New business acceptance is much faster now. Most requests are cleared within an hour. Lawyers no longer waste time looking at paperbased conflicts reports.

BRITTALISA GESS, CONFLICTS COUNSEL, LANE POWELL