Thomson Reuters Panoramic Solution

On Wednesday, Thomson Reuters announced the release of a new legal workflow solution called Panoramic that is geared towards connecting “the front and back office” of a law firm.

If that sounds like a drawn out way of saying increase efficiency, well you wouldn't be wrong. The solution was designed to help firms to increase transparency and provide a more effective way to predict profitability, something that corporate clients are looking for as they aim to cut costs and do more with less.

“We know that clients continue to take more [work] in-house, and law firms across the globe for years have been forced to pivot towards efficiency more,” said Elisabet Hardy, vice president of financial and practice management at Thomson Reuters.

The initial release, scheduled for April 8, will target the United States and the United Kingdom, but Hardy said the company could explore other territories down the line. The product was built on top of Thomson Reuters' financial management system 3E and received input from the law firms of LeClairRyan and K&L Gates during the development process.

Speaking of development, key to the architecture of the solution are “Matter Maps,” which break a given project down into phases and associated tasks. Practice areas that can be addressed in detail include corporate M&A, capital markets, litigation and finance.

Attorneys can use Panoramic to assign tasks to themselves or another lawyer, which come complete with due dates and billing codes. The nature or particulars of those assignments can then be adapted mid-process as the need arises.

Christopher Lange, an attorney at LeClairRyan and the liaison on the Panoramic project, said the solution can give lower-level attorneys a broader view (hence “Panoramic”) of a matter beyond the individual duties assigned to them. Clients will also be able to view in real-time how their projects are unfolding.

The ability to track that progress could be useful as corporations rethink the way their legal bills are calculated. Per Lange, clients are increasingly looking at other alternative fee arrangements to replace the traditional billable hours structure that has dominated the legal industry.

“And a law firm's ability to both commit to the client to do that and then manage the work profitably is going to be a real key to success as we see the market moving more towards alternative fee arrangements and further away from only looking at rates times hours,” Lange said.

For the solution to be effective, there's still an element of change management that needs to be involved. In other words, attorneys have to actually be motivated to enter the task-related data and information the product utilizes. Hardy said Thomson Reuters has been working with clients to ensure that Panoramic is conducive to productivity.

“It is a change in the way that you approach your work, and with that comes certainly a commitment from the firm perspective that that's something that you do want to participate in and that you're driving towards making your firm more effective and more efficient,” Hardy said.