Mills & Reeve are App’y to help
Something that comes up time and time again when we ask our people why they enjoy working at Mills & Reeve, is the interesting and varied clients and work. We’re incredibly lucky that our work spans a broad range of legal sectors and jurisdictions for a diverse range of clients: from multinational listed companies and fast growth start-ups to entrepreneurs and some of the world’s most established and prestigious organisations.
This wide variety of clients requires a breadth of innovative solutions and services to ensure we are providing the best support for them and their differing needs.
Unsurprisingly, as 92% of adult Britons own a phone and spend an average of 3 hours and 23 minutes a day scrolling, such solutions and services are increasingly moving into the digital world.
Cue Fliplet, a prefab app building platform that puts app building power directly into the hands of the no/low coders. For Mills & Reeve, this job falls to our client innovation team who have worked with Fliplet for the past 3 years to create, launch and maintain mobile and web apps quickly and easily.
Not only are apps valuable tools for legal service delivery, they are also fun to make. As accidental technologists, the team have had great fun developing and testing apps, a testament to Fliplet’s easy to use platform.
Client solutions
Half the fun of being in the innovation team is the solution finding. We love a challenge and oddly quite enjoy when lawyers come to us with an issue that needs solving. You can imagine our joy when a lawyer team came to us for help earlier in the year and the solution ended up being a brand new external facing webapp.
The life sciences client needed a solution to serve a high volume of court ready files, including hundreds of documents, videos and images to persons both known and unknown. It’s surprising how tricky it is to send documents to individuals when you don’t have their email address. Most popular document share platforms, from Sharefile and Dropbox, to HighQ and Microsoft Teams mostly need an email address to grant access.
The webapp proved to be the perfect solution. It was:
- Quick to build – within a matter of weeks it was ready to show to a judge to agree the new protocol for serving the documentation
- Low cost – we used existing technology with no data storage charges and low levels of input time from the lawyers
- Had no log in restrictions – allowing it to be accessible to persons unknown and reducing data and security risks
- Included a QR code – scanning the QR code offers instant access to the most up to date documents
- Useful for upskilling our teams – The client innovation team now have experience in building this type of solution and can template the webapp for future use cases
The webapp has removed a significant administrative burden from the client at no cost to them, demonstrating real added value through an innovative approach to service solutions.
Understanding client needs
While apps can be highly useful, they are most definitely not the answer to everything. Having a sound understanding of a client’s reality, needs and wants plays a huge part in delivering successful solutions.
This leads us in nicely to our top tips for how to create innovative app solutions:
- Empathise with your end user! Step into their shoes to understand exactly what the problem is, how it affects them and why they need a solution to that issue.
- It’s all about the stakeholders! Developing an app is one thing but managing appropriate input from different specialities across the business is a different ball game. Have you considered risk? Terms and conditions? Cookies and privacy policies? Branded visuals? User experience? Sponsor approval? Accurate and up to date content? A successful app requires input from the right people at the right time, helped along with a streamlined process.
- Streamline the process, app building was completely new to us as a firm 3 years ago, the fail fast method served us well for some time as we were able to quickly develop and push out apps then just as quickly disable them as required. Having a standardised app development process in place, including relevant gateways for approval and stakeholder input has made app development much easier.
- Do you really need an app? We all love an app, but it needs to meet a client or internal need. Don’t reinvent the wheel if an existing piece of tech will do the job for you just as well.
- Ask for help! We can’t take all the credit, Fliplet have been such a fantastic support to the team, always happy to help with a question, no matter how daft. After all, we are the accidental technologists, and it doesn’t always come naturally!
Grace MacWilliam
Innovation Engagement Advisor
Mills & Reeve
