“We don’t describe ourselves as a law firm. We are a legal services provider, a legal disruptor”, says Karl Chapman, CEO of Riverview Law. “We want to deliver legal services more effectively and eventually we will have productised our entire business.”
Riverview Law, from a start in February 2012 with 9 people in the Wirral, to over 200 in 3 UK and 2 US offices and the awarding of its own training contracts in August 2016, has come a long way in a short time. Chapman started off in Guinness Mahon, the investment management business before setting up CRT and then AdviserPlus, outsourced HR advisory businesses in and around 2000. Although originally a law student, Chapman took the business career route and never looked back.
Riverview Law initially targeted small businesses as potential early adopters who could see the value of managed legal services but they wanted to focus on in-house departments and had underestimated the interest company lawyers had in technology, managed legal services and cost control. Riverview started to attract the attention of large corporates almost immediately and their client base consists of a number of FTSE100 companies including Vodafone.
One of Chapman’s often quoted presentation starting points is that “Legal is the most effective forecaster of the next 3 months’ sales in any organisation.” They can make forecasts because they know all the hurdles the business is facing or will face in terms of upcoming and existing transactions.
Essentially Riverview offers corporate clients a range of managed legal services for a fixed price. Legal processes can be broken down into a series of tasks some of which are best performed by machine led or automated computer programmes. Chapman talks about “triage” as the most important part of the legal process – finding out how best to deal with a legal issue, to whom it should be sent to etc. From April this year, “Virtual Assistants” in the form of a computer software program collect and sift data from clients about a range of legal tasks and operates as a project management tool for the in-house department. This tool enables the legal function to operate in a much more efficient manner.
All the data the Virtual Assistant gathers about cases, dates, timings and costs feeds into dashboards giving the legal function valuable management information about how the department is running and key performance data on case handling and efficiency. These types of project management or workflow solutions can be invaluable aids to stressed legal functions. They have recently launched a Spanish speaking equivalent.
The Virtual Assistants are powered by software called KIM (Knowledge Intelligence Meaning) but need no extensive installation or training. In-house teams can produce their own bespoke versions quite simply and the software itself is accessed via the internet.
As Riverview is a technology-led legal service, there are a lot of functions being performed by non-lawyers. Although Chapman refers to people-led outsourced legal solutions as “short-term labour arbitrage” and is obviously familiar with the outsourcing of functions from his time at CRT, he still employs a lot of lawyers. At present there are over 100 lawyers in Riverview and they are training their own but, as the productising process takes hold, there will be a greater proportion of non-lawyers who are more likely to be trained in technology than law.
The structure of legal training is clearly something that Chapman is very interested in. “I cannot wait for the legal infrastructure to change” he said. He has contributed to the training debate with the SRA, among others, but the process of change is slow. “We cannot be responsible for the development of the legal profession, but we are doing what we can to help our own”. Clearly this has fed into the training contracts being offered since as Chapman has often said “in 2 to 3 years time, if we are still recruiting senior lawyers from outside Riverview Law, I should be fired.”
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