Troutman Pepper Atlanta offices. Courtesy photo

Troutman Pepper Hamilton Sanders

Troutman Pepper's innovation committee partnered with Framework Consulting to custom-build a platform that is a forward-looking survey tool infused with AI that simplifies the challenges of workload allocation and capacity planning and can potentially measure stress impacts using the volume of overtime work on associates. This platform, Engage, was inspired by challenges that arose while everyone was fully remote—practice workload grew, and leadership needed a better system for determining who was available to take on matters. The previous system required weekly surveys in order to generate a report on availability. With Engage, practice leadership can now access how much availability an associate has at any given time.

Necessity is the mother of invention. What need was your firm inspired to address with your innovation?

Working remotely and in isolation due to the pandemic had exacerbated the challenge that came with understanding who could take on more work and who could not. A practice group approached us to create a system for surveying associates on their availability. The resulting system, Engage, was a success that solved the availability problem and, in addition, leveraged AI, to help present a skill profile to assist in staffing new projects. The Engage app was presented and welcomed by other practice groups who had cobbled together their own systems of emails, calendar entries and spreadsheets to solve these problems.