Coping with compliance
Coping with compliance
As the spectre of regulatory compliance looms large in Australia, more businesses are desperately on the look out for bulletproof solutions to cope with this higher level of scrutiny. By Rodney Appleyard
Until recently, legal firm Gilbert and Tobin counted themselves among those organisations looking to control its flow of documents whilst ensuring that its infrastructure could meet the demands imposed by regulatory compliance.
The work carried out by the organisation's 450 lawyers includes cases involving large commercial transactions, mergers and acquisitions for telecom and aviation organisations, and dispute settlements for utility and gas companies. In addition, it works with banks and media companies to help speed up their legal processes throughout Australia, New Zealand, Asia and other areas of the world. It would not be able to keep on top of this work without a proper document management process in place.
Lawyers at the firm found it far too difficult to cope with ever increasing mountains of paperwork and documentation. This included letters, faxes, court papers and corporate documents. The firm felt it needed to incorporate an appropriate document management system that could control the flow of documents as well as taking the sting out of compliance demands.
Simon Gilchrist, the IT manager at Gilbert and Tobin, talks about why Interwoven's WorkSite system made such an impact to the firm.
"The WorkSite system created an environment where we could control all of our documents digitally and have access to them far more easily than we could with the old system. We scanned all of our documents into the system and had them all categorised by matter, which could be retrieved from a central repository. Each unique matter had an account number which everybody could access via the WorkSite software."
The system allows the firm to retrieve this information through a web browser interface, which has security settings attached, so only certain people have access to key documents. Different levels of access include read only and editing options.
"Finding documents before used to cost us too much time and money, which resulted in a loss of revenue and meant that mistakes could potentially be made over compliance requirements," admits Gilchrist.
Gilchrist believes that the system has also played a significant role in helping the firm expand.
"There is no doubt in my mind that the WorkSite system has allowed us to take on more cases because our system is far more efficient. This has freed up more time to deal with new projects. It has allowed us to expand our business quite significantly."
Australian business as a whole has recently experienced a rising tide of corporate litigation, consolidations, mergers and some of the most sweeping changes to corporate governance ever to take place. This has meant that most corporate legal departments have faced unprecedented workloads, increased scrutiny, and tight budgets. This has made these companies think even harder about being more vigilant about controlling large costs such as outside legal fees and discovery requests.
Without the appropriate tools, corporate lawyers can waste precious resources searching for precedents, logging in and out of the extranets of their various outside lawyers, FedExing board meeting materials, chasing down contract revisions in email attachments and conducting inefficient activities.
The WorkSite system is designed specifically to counteract all of these negative influences on modern day companies, by creating an environment where all of this information can be managed far more conveniently. Interwoven's version control functionality has healed much of the pain for companies such as Gilbert and Tobin too. In the past, workers would have to deal with five different versions of the same document. Sometimes they would work on the wrong document and get confused about which was the most up to date version.
Now, however, only the most recent version can be edited. Each person involved in every part of the workflow can keep track of the status, and know exactly who updated it last. Richard Collins, managing director of Interwoven in Australia and New Zealand, explains why so many law firms, such as Gilbert and Tobin, Minter Ellison and Cutler Hughes, are enamoured with the system.
"You can have access to it anywhere in the world through the web. It is also integrated into Outlook and Microsoft Office, so you can use other applications seamlessly. It keeps companies on top of compliance risks, which is becoming as big as Y2K. It doesn't take long to roll out the system either-only about four or five days, so companies get immediate business gains.
"There are five key pain points for corporate legal departments, which our solution addresses. These are-managing the matter file; managing documentation from external lawyers; taking care of compliance needs for the board of directors; carrying out policy publication and monitoring; and controlling contract management."
Intervowen's WorkSite helps companies meet requirements of compliance regulations by managing the documentation of financial controls, offering collaboration around corporate decision-making, providing visibility to external regulators, and operationalising the control environment.
It claims to be the only solution that addresses all phases of compliance requirements, such as documentation control, constant monitoring, testing and reporting.
John Brand, vice president of technology research services at analysts META Group, describes how such systems are so vital in easing the financial burden for companies."Corporate legal departments are under intense pressure to reduce costs and do more with less while keeping pace with an ever-widening scope of work. To comply with new government regulations, these groups are faced with implementing strict internal controls and meticulous record keeping.
The explosion of content across email and electronic files coupled with paper records has raised the cost of discovery in the event of litigation. An increased focus on corporate governance increases the need to document decisions made by boards of directors and the work of board committees. In addition, corporate legal departments must expand additional resources managing the work of outside law firms, while contract creation, negotiation and management remain a major bottleneck."
Interwoven's goal was to ease these worries for Gilbert and Tobin through the use of WorkSite, and judging by the time its freed up for the company to focus on new clients, it seems that this particular management solution has met its target of controlling documents and keeping the company out of reach of compliance dangers.
Related Article: