Client Profile

Customer Name: Legal Ombudsman

Established: 2010

Customer Since: 2016

Employees: 260

Sector: Public Sector

The Legal Ombudsman (LeO) was formed in October 2010 as a result of the Legal Services Act 2007 and is appointed by the Office for Legal Complaints to run an independent scheme that resolves complaints about lawyers in a fair and effective way, helping to drive improvements to legal services.

LeO is a high-profile public body, dealing with over 100,000 contacts per year. The Legal Ombudsman engaged Version 1’s Innovation Labs to explore how automation technology can deliver real differences across their organisation.

The Customer’s Challenge

The current process for registering complaints to the Legal Ombudsman starts from the organisation’s website where consumers access the Customer Assessment Tool (CAT) and fill out the required information. Validation is applied across the data, with the overall process stopping if the complaint does not meet the required criteria.

If the complaint is successful, a summary email is generated and sent to a shared mailbox which is monitored by the Legal Ombudsman’s employees. Upon receipt of a new email, this will create a new case on the company’s CRM system and manually fill all the required information. As is commonplace with any manual data entry, this is a slow and repetitive process which is prone to human error.

Automating the Manual

With the case entry process being tedious and time-consuming for its employees, LeO engaged Version 1’s Innovation Labs to explore how RPA (Robotic Process Automation) could help in overcoming this challenge.

The time to process each case is around 10-15 minutes, which reduces the productivity of caseworkers. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) was identified as the perfect solution by Version 1 to automate this process.

Discovering the Power of Automation in an Agile Manner

After analysing initial requirements, Version 1 planned to implement an RPA solution that would automatically handle complaint forms, input them into CRM, and perform an in-jurisdiction check. As a leading Microsoft partner, Version 1 utilised Logic Apps due to its functional connectivity to Outlook and CRM Dynamics in the Legal Ombudsman’s internal systems.

The PoV was implemented in 4 bi-weekly sprints, fully automating the assessment phase of the Case registration process along with the in-jurisdiction check. The solution is planned to be in production by the end of Q1 2021.

The Innovation Labs are currently engaging with LeO for another PoV employing Smart Text, our Natural Language Processing (NLP) solution, to summarise the documents attached to a case. This solution will empower LeO’s employees, delivering the most important insights from the document rapidly.

Real Differences, Delivered

The following benefits were achieved for the Legal Ombudsman by the Version 1 Innovation Labs:

•  Version 1 automated the case creation process with all the necessary validations.
•  A unique, consistent way to register new cases in LeO’s CRM was developed.
•  Version 1 automated the In-jurisdiction check based on the complaint data.
•  The case creation process time frame was significantly reduced – from a complaint being received to case creation, now taking 45 seconds from 15 minutes.
•  There is now better resource utilisation capability for LeO, with 260 man-days saved per year due to the introduction of RPA.
•  As some of these benefits are measurable, this solution gave LeO confidence to explore new technologies like Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing that could be incorporated along with existing/new RPA to create Hyper/Smart Automation.
•  The longer-term benefit is that LeO, as a business, has started how and in which business process to apply new technologies for empowering their employees and provide better service to its customers.