CASE STUDY
Global law firm Morgan , Lewis & Bockius LLP has a longstanding commitment to innovation . The firm ’ s Knowledge Management and Practice Services team works alongside lawyers and clients to implement sophisticated digital business solutions .
Solution : Collaborating with lawyers to improve mutual fund advisory contract reviews
Throughout 2019 the UX Design team incorporated OutSystems into its innovation approach .
One such solution is the firm ’ s new ‘ AdviserDash ’ portal , which digitally transforms a registered fund ’ s SEC-regulated 15 ( c ) advisory contract review process . The application automates the distribution and collection of an annual renewal questionnaire , making it easier to identify year-over-year changes and analyze investment advisers ’ key data metrics .
Challenge : Transform legal service delivery with user experience design
Morgan Lewis is a global law firm with 31 offices in the United States , Asia , Europe and the Middle East . With more than 2,200 lawyers and specialists , the firm provides comprehensive corporate , transactional , litigation and regulatory services to numerous industries . The firm takes great pride in providing consistent , exceptional client service to global clients .
Named the most innovative law firm by BTI Consulting Group in 2018 , the firm established a User Experience ( UX ) Design team that same year . The team is now an integral part of Morgan Lewis ’ s Knowledge Management and Practice Services team . This cross-functional group delivers customized internal and client-facing solutions that enhance the firm ’ s legal services .
Josh Rosenzweig , Senior Director of Digital Transformation and User Experience , joined Morgan Lewis in 2018 to explore new opportunities for collaboration and implement new product and service ideas .
The firm ’ s UX Design team went in search of technologies to support user-centric design and rapid , iterative development , with a particular focus on fast , efficient and flexible UX design .
Those criteria led to OutSystems , a leading modern application platform with high productivity , connected and AI-assisted tools to help developers rapidly build and deploy a full range of applications anywhere the organization requires .
“ We have a remit to experiment with the firm ’ s practices ,” said Rosenzweig . “ For us , the exciting thing about OutSystems is the ability to focus less on coding and more on human-centric design . It perfectly complements our lean start-up , agile and iterative approach .”
Although the team delivered a facial recognition demonstrator app and an innovation portfolio management app for internal use , it wasn ’ t until a challenging project for the firm ’ s investment management practice in April 2020 that the firm unleashed the full power of rapid iterative development .
Tim Levin , a Morgan Lewis Partner and Leader of the Investment Management Practice , identified an opportunity to streamline the annual mutual fund advisory agreement renewal process that the practice manages for many clients . The old process was highly manual , and no off-the-shelf software was available to streamline the information collection , curation and collaboration .
“ Historically , the process relied on manually composed emails and attached Word document questionnaires to collect information from investment advisers ,” said Rosenzweig . “ Apart from the inefficient manual process , there was limited traceability and little ability to customize or leverage past work . To scale this service to more clients , we needed to reimagine the workflows and at the same time dramatically improve the user experience for lawyers , investment advisers and our registered fund clients .”
The initial brief was little more than a single-page flow diagram , but the UX Design team quickly worked alongside the lawyers to turn that into a design concept with wireframes and prototypes .
Following a few workshops with the investment management practice , Rosenzweig ’ s team and Truewind were ready to start development .
Results : AdviserDash – a first-tomarket cloud-based solution for SEC 15 ( c ) reviews
“ We were looking for a platform that would allow us to quickly spin up apps , get feedback from users , and make improvements on the fly , while at the same time delivering enterprise-grade security and scalability ,” said Rosenzweig .
Morgan Lewis joined forces with a team from Truewind , including an enterprise architect , a lead developer and three developers . Development took place over four months between April and August 2020 in a series of short sprints .
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