Conversations with our clients take unexpected directions

It never fails to impress me how our creative clients takes the use of a product in a direction we never contemplated. Or, even before the design phase, they often speak about a legal frustration that sparks the conversation internally of ‘can we solve this?’

One such example is around legal translation. This is something we get called upon fairly often to do. We’re a bilingual firm, so it’s natural our clients would think of us for it.

It wasn’t until I asked a then prospective client where their legal pain points were that we were given a piece of feedback gold.

They summarized their current process (dramatic emphasis is mine) as:

1. Dispatch translation mandate to external firm
2. Hear nothing for an indefinite period
3. Receive completed translation at random time
4. Get a surprise invoice

The problems with this service model are obvious: No certainty around receipt of mandate, no transparency as to processing progress and no predictability around cost.

Thinking of how we could solve these shortcomings, I took it to our team. A digital intake, dashboarding, and processing against KPI’s is nothing new, but bringing predictability of cost had some technical challenges. Gerard Beaulieu, our Legal Ops guy is who we lean on for this stuff. Once he had understood what we were trying to do he went home and had the whole thing built over the weekend.

With our client giving some essential feedback as we refined the tech, we came up with a really slick process.

We designed a digital intake so our client can upload a document, select normal or urgent processing, receive a cost estimate in advance, and follow progress of all mandates on a digital dashboard. The final translated document is returned with a cover memo from the lawyer explaining any notable translation decisions taken and flagging any obvious structural issues with the document.

Once again, it was our clients’ help with the hard part, the ideation and prioritization of a problem focused on something we are uniquely equipped to solve. You rock Dave.