Freeths puts knowledge at the heart of its growth strategy

Freeths is one of the UK’s largest full-service law firms. With 13 offices across the UK and more than 1,200 colleagues (around half of whom are lawyers), the top 50 UK law firm offers wide-ranging expertise, covering real estate, corporate, litigation, and private client services. By putting knowledge at the heart of its growth strategy, Freeths has grown tremendously over the last 10 to 15 years.

Using existing knowledge as a growth lever

According to Nick Pryor, Director of Knowledge and Innovation at Freeths, law firms are fundamentally knowledge businesses: ​“All our expertise is built on what we’ve done and what we’ve learned.” By putting knowledge at the core of their strategy as they get bigger and bigger, Nick Pryor and his team want to make sure they’re sharing best practices and expert knowledge so all of their lawyers can stand on the shoulders of what they’ve done before.

Nathasha Armstrong, Senior Manager of Legal Innovation and Change, adds that knowledge provides the building blocks for the work their lawyers do: ​“So we’re thinking about precedents, we’re thinking about work product, but we’re also thinking about things like guidance and allowing our junior lawyers to build their confidence and their knowledge”.

Knowledge is also central in the way the company is organized: ​“We don’t silo knowledge away from innovation. We’re one team, one department”, Armstrong says. And that is important since she believes innovation should be supporting people and processes: ​“I think it’s really easy to see tech as the answer to everything, but it’s about plugging the gaps between people and processes and knowledge, rather than being a standalone thing on its own”.

A sharing mindset is key

Pryor believes that knowledge sharing is partly about culture, but that systems and processes are what enable and help lawyers to practice it daily and build habits around knowledge sharing. ​“Legal tech is important to us in many ways, but especially so when it comes to knowledge management and our knowledge strategy”, he says. Armstrong’s role is to facilitate this sharing process: ​“My main goals are to reduce duplication, to share best practices, standardize processes, and all of those are achieved via sharing mindset.”

A one-stop shop for company-wide knowledge

During the past few years, Pryor has witnessed how technology has been incrementally improving the working lives and outcomes of legal service delivery. However, he believes we are now at a point of acceleration. Pryor says law firms need to embrace technology in a more holistic way to remain competitive. ​“It will be at the core of how we practice law in the decades to come and will be as much a part of the conversation as it is about the legal expertise we provide to our clients.”

Armstrong’s vision for this holistic approach is a one-stop shop where lawyers can do all their work in one place. ​“We’ve had a plethora of amazing legal tech products come out, and I think what’s really key is building the network between them so that lawyers can do all of their work in one place, whether that’s Word or Outlook.”

Quick access to quality content

Recently, Freeths invested in a new intranet and knowledge database to house the work product that its lawyers have built up over the years. The firm was looking for a way to access its quality content as quickly as possible, wherever it resided. ​“Henchman seemed to fill a need that we had, and in particular was able to integrate very easily with our document management system and our knowledge repository,” says Pryor.

Armstrong praises Henchman’s customer support team for their attention to detail. She likes that Henchman provided them with helpful resources, such as email templates for announcing demos or training sessions. ​“It’s really important for us to be able to explain the value of the product to our lawyers. They’re very busy. Getting them to take time out of their schedules to participate in these calls during the adoption phase is essential. Henchman provides me with the right content to get their attention.”

Her biggest tip for driving adoption? Don’t be afraid to over-communicate: send the emails, write the articles, set up pages on your intranet, and set up sessions where you sit side-by-side and work on the tools together. People learn in different ways, and we have to recognize that.