With business process management (BPM) moving up the IT agenda and into the mainstream, the battleground is becoming increasingly competitive as established vendors reposition themselves to try to capture a share of this growing market.

As practice management, document management and other suppliers move to offer enhanced workflow features within their core products, how will this impact on the requirement for BPM solutions within law firms?

The idea of traditional line-of-business suppliers incorporating workflow extensions into their applications is not new. While some legal sector vendors are enhancing their workflow functionality, the real change is the shift in marketing strategy to attempt to go head-to-head with enterprise BPM solutions.

The fact that some practice management systems (PMS) vendors are claiming their systems now remove the need for standalone BPM solutions is a key development.

These types of workflow extensions are not, however, a substitute for enterprise BPM. While these enhancements can improve process flows, we believe they are generally ineffective when support is required for new processes or for actions where users need to step outside the core system in question.

Condition process flows

Ian Beck, head of IT at Scottish firm Tods Murray, supports this stance. He says: "There are broad differences between investing in a BPM product, as compared to traditional in-built PMS and document management systems (DMS) workflow add-ons. Only enterprise BPM provides an independent data services layer that can condition process flows based upon the values of data within a completely new composite application. This leverages the value of data held in disparate systems, ensuring efficiencies, quality, cost effectiveness and compliance."

In addition to the specialist legal sector vendors, general industry giants such as Microsoft have similarly extended their support for process automation with development tools such as BizTalk Server, InfoPath and now Windows Workflow Foundation.

These development tools assist organisations, or law firms with a large internal development resource, to develop bespoke code for individual process solutions. However, although recent announcements represent a measurable technical advance, these offerings do little to eliminate the key challenges of development projects. They do not solve issues such as maintaining multiple technical development tools, overruns, ongoing maintenance costs and an inability to quickly evolve and react to change.

Major software company

As a Microsoft Gold Partner and software solution developer, FloSuite – where appropriate – makes full use of Microsoft's latest toolsets. But these tools only form a part of what is still a technically-complex development environment. FloSuite's customers clearly share this view of reality, which is why they do not wish to take on the responsibilities of trying to be a major software company.

Peter Wonson, IT director at City firm Mishcon de Reya, supports the theory that enterprise BPM is a broader, more flexible option than the market alternatives. He says: "BPM offers excellent opportunities for long-term development and management of core processes within law firms."

For example, he adds: "Through the flexibility and ease-of-use of its Microsoft Visio-based process modelling tools, FloSuite allows rapid deployment and evolution of sophisticated solutions all within the one easy-to-use development environment."

One of the factors fuelling demand for BPM within the legal sector is an increased interest in driving efficiency and reducing costs through IT strategy. With the advent of the post-Clementi era, interest is growing among business decision makers – not just the technologists – as partners and managing partners look for new ways to protect their competitive advantage in an increasingly liberalised market, where national and international brands such as Tesco and the RAC plan to offer packaged legal services.

It seems likely that high street law firms will have more to fear than larger corporate law firms – the most likely areas for new entrants to focus on being high volume processes, such as residential property conveyancing and personal injury claims. However, there are also implications for the medium – and maybe even larger firms – which have departments focused on low-value, high-volume processes.

So as firms wish to manage increasing compliance requirements and prepare their plans to contest a competitive landscape, which practice areas should they consider for BPM projects? Where are the greatest benefits to be gained?

FloSuite has found that clients most often target initial rollouts at administrative procedures that involve updating information held in multiple computerised systems, rather than focusing BPM on specific practice areas or departments.

Client matter inception

"The most visible BPM opportunity for a legal firm is without question client matter inception," says Beck. "This process is not simply focused on assisting the fee earner in completing money laundering, conflicts or client engagement letters, but extends the process reach to the many other silos of information such as client relationship management (CRM), document management systems, case management and human resources (HR) systems, to name but a few."

This opinion is supported by practical evidence of the priorities that legal sector clients typically set for deployment of BPM solutions. According to FloSuite, new client matter inception – and other administrative procedures such as cheque request – are indeed a current 'hot spot' among medium and large-sized firms in the UK and internationally.

Mishcon de Reya, for example, focused its initial FloSuite deployment on this process. The firm's implementation included a number of key areas: integration of key applications – in Mishcon's case, this included InterAction, CMS.NET, Inter-woven WorkSite and Microsoft Exchange; money laundering procedures; credit checking; conflict of interest checking; letter of engagement production; and approval processes based on values and data.

"Improving adherence to best practice processes and increasing the quality of data collected as part of a new client or matter inception is a logical place to start with BPM. It is, after all, the initial process that all others flow from and if not managed correctly can cause problems throughout many stages of the entire client interaction," says Wonson.

He continues: "In medium to large law firms, multiple application environments are the norm, and so they need the flexibility and reach of a BPM solution that can quickly bring together all of the elements of enterprise application integration, data modelling, rules management and user interface design within a single framework."

While compliance has been a major driver for many firms adopting BPM, improved client services, data and cost reduction are also key factors. Operational efficiency savings of up to 50% have been reported by some legal firms as a result of successful BPM deployments.

As it looks certain that PMS and other vendors in the legal marketplace will continue to enhance their products' pre-built workflow capabilities, the enterprise BPM players will have to really sell their distinct business case to ensure they continue to differentiate themselves in this increasingly competitive marketplace. But this increased competition does not signal the end for enterprise BPM providers – as one senior figure from a PMS supplier recently commented. Rather, the market hype only serves to increase user awareness of the issues the legal profession needs to overcome to continually improve its service offerings and efficiency. This, in turn, is driving demand for applications that meet these requirements.

What the PMS, DMS and other general vendors are offering is once again just 'application-based workflow' with similar limitations to previous versions. The future for BPM is bright.

Russell Wood is vice president of sales for FloSuite.