We’re helping one of the ‘top 100’ UK law firms, based in the southwest of the country, to automate their New Matter Intake process with K2.
As part of their onboarding process, this firm had to send documents, and sometimes forms, to be completed and signed by potential clients. A paper process of forwarding documents to clients was slow, as was the process of scanning them back into the system once completed and returned. The firm considered the possibility of developing a ‘forms solution’ that would send forms to their clients to be signed and eventually returned as a PDF (assuming the client had the technology to produce and e-mail the PDF). Of course, this meant that there was no consistency in how the forms were returned from client to client.
An alternative solution was then raised—what about DocuSign? (For those who don’t know, DocuSign is a leading provider of digital transaction management software including things like electronic signatures.)
We decided to try the DocuSign integration that came out-of-the-box with K2. This worked to a degree; we could now send and receive completed forms. But there was still the matter of first setting the forms up with the right information for the clients to view/revise. There was also the issue of extracting the returned information for use by the ongoing workflow. The DocuSign integration for K2 didn’t provide this functionality. Before giving up, we turned the problem over to our software development team, who have a strong understanding of K2 integrations.
After digging deep into DocuSign, our team was able to create a new SmartObject add-on that enabled the automatic population of form data from our client’s PMS via the K2 Workflow and extract updates/changes from the executed document. The document was sent to the client for completion with most of the required information already in the form. Once the client added or updated information on the form the process extracted any additions or changes and automatically included them in the workflow. The PDF copy of the form (automatically generated by DocuSign) was saved to the newly minted iManage workspace that the process generated for the new engagement.
All in all, we created an opportunity to save a significant amount of time on the effort to generate, send, receive and properly record client responses. At the same time, we significantly reduced the likelihood of human error and introduced the possibility of enabling clients to automatically update their own client record details.
Howard Russell, Co-CEO, RBRO Solutions