In OneAdvanced’s Legal Sector Trends Report, only a quarter of law firms told us they were realising more than 70% of their billable hour targets on average – with the majority performing weaker. With that in mind, fee-earners, and departments, especially those in process-driven departments, such as wills and probate, find themselves tasked with being more efficient and managing more tasks with fewer resources.
One such way that private client departments could create efficiencies is by streamlining the private client process. The National Will Register’s Will Search Combined allows firms to make a single enquiry to search the 10.5 million registered Wills on The National Will Register’s system, and unregistered Wills in geographically targeted areas. By streamlining this process, firms save hours on correspondence.
With a conservative estimate of 2 hours searching for any additional Wills per case, a fee-earner with two hundred probate cases in a year could save four hundred billable hours. At the UK average of £278 per billable hour, which would amount to £111,200 that could be allocated towards further work.
Not only does conducting a Will Search save you time during probate, The National Will Register can also help you save time and gain extra revenue before the probate process even starts. During Will Writing, you are able to register the Will, ensuring that it can be easily found at the time of passing. This then automatically links the Will back to your firm, putting it in the best position to win the probate work. This ultimately means less revenue spent on creating pipeline and more time spent on cases.
The National Will Register integrates with OneAdvanced’s practice and case management solutions, ALB, and Partner for Windows (P4W) – and is part of the OneAdvanced Legal portfolio. By doing so, you can conduct Will registration and Will search from within your firm’s native case management system, keeping everything within a single system and becoming part of your workflow – making your probate process more efficient.
The results of this in terms of efficiency are twofold:
- Where it would take five minutes or more to log in and conduct a search through the website, searching can happen within a minute. Over two hundred probate cases per fee-earner per year, that’s an additional 13 hours and 20 minutes saved.
- By integrating the system into the workflow of your wills and probate team you are encouraging best practice and the most compliant step in ensuring that Wills administered are the right ones. Even one contested Will after administration has begun can take countless hours and thousands of pounds to contest in the courts.
Find out more about OneAdvanced Legal and how it provides the best of practice and case management and The National Will Register by clicking here.