To fulfil its mission “to be Australia’s leading transactions, regulatory and disputes law firm – committed to outstanding citizenship," the law firm of Gilbert + Tobin is continuously striving to improve digital service delivery by leveraging best-in-class service management technologies. That commitment has led it into a long-term partnership with Ivanti.
The firm was founded in 1988 by Danny Gilbert and Tony Tobin as a small team of lawyers focused on providing excellent legal advice on high-profile, complex matters. Since then, it’s grown to over 1000 employees servicing 150+ corporate clients.
At its very start, the firm was oriented around delivering more efficient and streamlined service. Its founders “were tired of the red tape, stiff style of most law firms and sought to make it more progressive and get rid of any unnecessary processes,” explains Steve Thornton, the firm’s Head of Service Delivery.
When Steve joined the firm in 2011 as their service desk manager, it lacked any ticket system. So, his first task was to evaluate the ticket systems that were available and implement a new one. The stopgap solution was an Excel spreadsheet that logged hundreds of issues, “most of which weren't even issues anymore,” he says.
To find a better solution, Steve and his team did their due diligence and evaluated other systems, including ServiceNow, before they decided on LANDESK, the forerunner to Ivanti Neurons for ITSM. This allowed them to implement a centralised ticket system whose capabilities helped the IT department grow organically over time.
In time, they looked to apply the model they’d built to other, non-IT support teams. The result of putting these systems in place? Those departments using them have seen a “tremendous” increase in their level of service delivery.
One upshot was that these teams came under Steve’s purview, transitioning him away from the IT service desk into a more holistic service delivery role that touched much more of the firm’s operations.
One factor that’s unique to law firms? Since most firms are partnerships, those partners expect a higher level of service, speed and efficiency. And non-partner attorneys don’t want to be distracted from legal tasks, either.
At Gilbert + Tobin, Steve and his staff now act as a services headquarters, “like an internal concierge service for the lawyers,” he says. That’s crucial because, by freeing lawyers from the burden of administrative or operations tasks, they can focus on billable hours.
“Ivanti is a very flexible tool for us,” Steve says. One area where Ivanti’s flexibility came in handy: Using Ivanti Neurons for Facilities, incident tickets could be re-labelled as “work orders,” a familiar term for teams like the facilities staff, making it easier to onboard them into the ticketing system.
Another benefit? “You can get a lot of data out of Ivanti,” Steve points out, “and it’s really helped to understand the type of jobs that teams are getting in, what times of the day, where demand spikes happen and what resolutions we’ve got in place.” This way, the team could identify demand was highest for services and assign roster accordingly.
“It’s even helped us define a process for our change control meetings,” Steve says. Those had relied on a written process, but Steve’s team realised changes might have been happening “under the radar” without review by the change board. Today, submitting changes requires using Ivanti and being guided through an easier, streamlined process for logging changes.
“The tools are highly configurable with a really easy visual workflow behind them,” Steve says. “I’ve noticed with Ivanti tools, when you get them out of the box, they have everything. Everything is turned on and you can just turn off what you don’t need.”
The Gilbert + Tobin team is looking forward expectantly to new ways of using Ivanti products. For instance, Steve is eager to mine the data he’s already capturing to implement greater efficiencies and keep increasing customer satisfaction and the user experience.
They’ve also begun implementing the full digital employee experience (DEX) capabilities of Ivanti Neurons. They’re exploring how it will be used across their entire service delivery environment, with a focus on how specific teams will utilise different components of Neurons.
They’re also looking forward to the implementation of Neuron’s hyperautomation bots to bring self-healing, self-securing and self-servicing into service delivery. Lawyers don’t have the time to spend on IT service calls, so having bots identify and repair issues before they even become visible will be a boon to the entire organisation. And to those billable hours!
“Our relationship with Ivanti feels quite special,” Steve says, appreciating the personal level of service he receives. “I find some other organisations to feel so big and massive that you’re just another customer to them.
“I find that the partnership we have with Ivanti is quite organically grown. It feels as though we could run into each other somewhere and sit down over wine and not even talk about Gilbert + Tobin or Ivanti.”
That customer-centric focus extends to the user community events he’s attended, such as Innovators Connect sessions: “Going to those online events, you start to recognise other customer’s names, then you attend an in-person event and meet them there. Then you’re able to put a face to the name, and that’s all a really nice value aspect of our relationship with Ivanti.”
Note: A customer’s results are specific to its total environment/experience, of which Ivanti is a part. Individual results may vary based on each customer’s unique environment.