Customer Case | Clifford Chance boosts efficiency with no-code

A bold decision

Among the UK-based law firms that make up the Magic Circle – five of the most prestigious law firms in the world – is Clifford Chance. With offices in 23 countries, Clifford Chance advises its clients on all aspects of commercial law. In a traditional industry, Clifford Chance made the bold decision to direct its technology capabilities beyond its day-to-day operations to focus on transforming its legal services delivery as part of its Innovation & Best Delivery strategy.

Driving automation in legal services

Peter van Eijk heads-up the Legal Technology Services and Innovation team whose focus is on developing innovative new solutions to digitize and automate processes. The end goal is to empower lawyers to bring more value to clients through using their extensive skills and knowledge, rather than spending their time on repetitive admin tasks.

Peter notes that legal services delivery is full of opportunities to redesign processes, identify the most relevant resources and technologies to optimise and automate workflows.  Most of those activities revolve around "documents", giving great opportunities to move out of the mailbox and Word documents towards digital workflows. This brings many additional benefits to its staff and clients, including quality and error controls in the data and workflows, transparency on the status of the work and faster reporting, but also generating telemetry data that the process owners can use to identify further areas for optimisation.

“Having used the platform for a number of data collection and data publishing tools has been very successful.”

Bridging the gap between Legal Teams and Technology Teams

There is always more to the challenge of modernizing a workflow than developing a tool, with Peter noting that, “IT-thinking is the opposite of lawyer-thinking.” By this, Peter means that lawyers are risk-focused; they look for flaws. IT professionals, on the other hand, understand that flaws are an inevitable part of innovation and that continuous improvement is essential.

This division between Legal teams and Technology teams is a universal challenge and Peter needed a solid strategy to demonstrate solutions in progress to help Legal teams better visualize and refine quickly and iteratively their needs. The strategy Peter needed was made possible by low/no-code.

In his eighteen years at Clifford Chance, Peter observed that the longer it takes to develop a solution, the greater the perceived risk to lawyers and the more likely it is that the solution will not meet the needs and adoption poor. Because the Betty Blocks no-code platform enabled Peter to shorten the software development lifecycle (SDLC), it helps more easily iterate on the emerging requirements and start earlier to use the solution.

The rapid prototyping capabilities afforded by the platform, combined with the use of agile development methodologies, enable Technology teams to be much more responsive to feedback, making for much better alignment between the two sides and, ultimately, more effective solutions.

Why Betty Blocks?

With the no-code landscape becoming increasingly competitive, why did Clifford Chance choose Betty Blocks over other vendors? Peter says the decision was, in part, based on Betty Blocks’ culture and people. This means that, as an organization, Betty Blocks enabled more effective communication, greater flexibility, and faster turnaround time than competitors were able to deliver. Peter is keen to highlight that, “Betty Blocks could offer these advantages whilst still being recognized as a Visionary in the no-code space according to Gartner.”

Peter and his team were also particularly impressed with the speed and simplicity of the prototyping process, saying, “The do-it-yourself concept was highest with Betty Blocks.” Peter cites a good example of this with a guide to employment law that was developed on the Betty Blocks platform in around one month, and which provides an overview of the most interesting aspects of employment in a number of jurisdictions.

From single-app solution to strategic implementation

Having started out working with Betty Blocks delivery partners Ilionx, Peter and his team now intend to build on their success by focusing on smaller use-cases and bringing more of the development in-house. This is the first step in the transition from single-app-solution to strategic implementation.

Strategically implementing Betty Blocks is how organizations can derive maximum value from no-code and realize their long-term software development goals. The benefits include:
● Faster and less costly maintenance;
● Automatic updates across all applications;
● Less reliance on third-party vendors and off-the-shelf products;
● Business-side employees are empowered to bring value to the development process, leading to a closer alignment between business and IT, better products, and increased client satisfaction.

Peter’s team can facilitate this transition by integrating Betty Blocks seamlessly within their existing IT infrastructure and building a modern layer of no-code applications around legacy systems. Although it’s not yet a common approach for all product development at Clifford Chance, Peter feels the no-code strategy will, over the next year, start proving he and his team can do more with less: “There are various examples of small workflow processes we can easily automate using no-code, so that’s where our focus should be.” Peter van Eijk.