Esquire Innovations, Inc.
Birch Horton Bittner & Cherot P.C. increases Document creation efficiency and consistency with iCreate implementation.
Esquire Innovations, Inc.
Already fans of Esquire Innovations’ iScrub metadata control program, law firm Birch Horton Bittner & Cherot turned to Esquire again when they needed to standardize their document formats. Esquire’s iCreate program was the perfect fit.
BACKGROUND
The firm, based in Alaska, has well over 50 employees and a second office in Washington D.C. As Birch Horton’s Manager of Information Systems Jean Blake said, “Prior to implementing iCreate, we had a hodge-podge of fonts and formats that individual attorneys had concocted, and each considered their format sacred and untouchable.”
Without a cohesive template solution, Birch Horton not only lost time, efficiency, and consistency but also risked having to rewrite and update all of their individual templates when it came time to upgrade the firm’s computer operating system.
STRATEGIC PROJECT PLANNING
As she embarked on her plan to create style and format standards for all of the firm’s documents, Jean designed a strategic adoption program to generate buy-in throughout the firm. Esquire’s software trainer Judye Carter Reynolds assisted with the adoption program and worked with Jean and her committee to customize iCreate according to feedback gathered during this process.
Esquire’s Vice President of Client Experiences, Judye Carter Reynolds, has over 25 years of experience as a technology trainer and is certified as a higher education teacher. “Judye's training? -- She is the best trainer I've ever worked with, bar none,” said Jean.
Working with Judye and the rest of the Esquire team, Jean and her committee got to work. “Our planning began approximately eight months prior to rollout,” said Jean. “The firm has an IT Committee comprised of two shareholders, a senior associate, associate, secretary and a paralegal. This group of six works with me and as a team we make recommendations regarding software and hardware.”
STRATEGIC PROJECT ADOPTION
Once the firm’s decision makers gave the green light, her committee structured the adoption program in three phases: template formats, pilot group and rollout. For the template phase, the committee worked with Esquire staff to identify all the documents to be formatted and to design the templates. Early in this process, Jean’s team had polled the entire office for their letter closings, signatures, email addresses, etc. and put that information into a spreadsheet in order to create a user database so that each document could be customized to the individual user. iCreate can use information from a firm’s contact management system to populate documents with these details.
Small pilot groups within the firm tested the templates for a period of time and reported their reaction and recommendations, which the committee and Esquire used to refine the templates and software program.
The rollout phase included intensive staff training. After implementing this structured adoption system, Birch Horton found that no additional modifications were necessary, even after many more people had the chance to use iCreate. Pleased with the results, Jean advised, “Don't skimp on the preplanning, don't skimp on the pilot group time and don't skimp on the training.”
For Jean and her team, the support they received from Esquire Innovations every step of the way, which they knew they could rely on from their experience with iScrub, was invaluable. “Seriously, the team at Esquire Innovations is one of the most cohesive and put-together groups I’ve met,” Jean said. “They care about their clients and they extend themselves personally to make sure their clients have a good product.”
END RESULT
Birch Horton has been able to add consistency and polish to its communications and even save time for its staff. “Once users moved past the initial install and training, document production has become a snap,” Jean said.
About Birch Horton Bittner & Cherot:
Birch Horton Bittner & Cherot is a multi-faceted law firm serving clients large and small, from multi-national corporations to Native-owned small business start-ups and from the State of Alaska to private individuals.
About iCreate:
iCreate encourages more efficient, standardized document production by providing ways to easily create automated templates for end users. iCreate also provides tools to quickly apply and make changes to styles, numbering and other MS Word formatting elements. Users have traditionally struggled with formatting MS Word documents, yet firms that implement iCreate find they can significantly reduce time spent drafting, formatting and re-purposing documents. iCreate leverages MS Word’s native architecture. The benefit of this is twofold. First, by retaining the look and feel of the native parent software dialog boxes, it promotes streamlined workflow, efficient usage and reduces end user training requirements. Second, by retaining Word’s native formatting, an electronic document can effectively be used for collaboration purposes, without concern that the formatting will be rendered completely useless. Traditionally in this scenario, added valuable time has been required to "fix" a document upon its return trip to the firm, thus negatively impacting overhead costs and efficiency.
About Esquire Innovations, Inc.:
With more than 600 law firm clients in 110 cities utilizing its applications, Esquire Innovations, Inc. is a leading provider of Microsoft Office integration software services and applications for the legal market. Esquire Innovations has been developing, supporting, and selling document creation, formatting, re-purposing, comparing, and metadata management software applications in the legal industry since 2002. The product line includes iCreate, a template and document production product, iScrub, metadata management for Microsoft Office documents, iRedline, the redlining tool for Microsoft Word and Excel, and iDocID, a powerful universal document management system-integrated ID stamper.
