Law firm Gilbert + Tobin is focused on continuously improving the digital tools at its lawyers’ disposal to help it achieve its mission: ‘To be Australia’s leading transactions, regulatory and disputes law firm – committed to outstanding citizenship.’ Its long-term partnership with Ivanti is at the heart of that strategy, enabling the firm to deliver best-in-class service management.
With over 1,000 employees servicing over 150 corporate clients, the firm has come a long way since it was first founded in 1988 by Danny Gilbert and Tony Tobin. But the commitment it had then to providing excellent legal advice on complex matters and delivering a more efficient and streamlined service is still the same today.
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.
Steve keeps that founding principle in mind every day. When he first joined as the firm’s service desk manager in 2011, there was no ticketing system, just an Excel spreadsheet that logged hundreds of issues, “most of which weren't even issues anymore,” he says.
Steve and his team wanted to put a centralised ticketing system in place. They did their due diligence and evaluated other systems, including ServiceNow, before deciding on LANDESK, the forerunner to Ivanti Neurons for ITSM. This new system allowed them to support the IT department as it grew over time.
The model they’d built worked so well that they looked to apply it to non-IT support teams, delivering what Steve calls a “tremendous” increase in their levels of service delivery.
One upshot was that Steve’s role grew. He transitioned away from the IT service desk into a more holistic service delivery role that touched much more of the firm’s operations.
Law firms are unique in that most 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.
Steve explains that he and his staff now act as a Services HQ for Gilbert + Tobin “like an internal concierge service for the lawyers”- and that’s crucial to the bottom-line, because freeing lawyers from the burden of administrative or operations tasks means they’re able to focus on billable hours.
“Ivanti is a very flexible tool for us,” Steve says. For example, when using Ivanti Neurons to support the Facilities team they re-labelled incident tickets as ‘work orders’, a familiar term in that department, making it easier to onboard teams.
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, at what times of the day, where demand spikes happen and what resolutions we’ve got in place.” That helped the team identify when demand for services was highest and 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, changes are submitted and logged using Ivanti - a much easier and more streamlined process.
“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 continually exploring new ways of using Ivanti Neurons ITSM to deliver greater efficiencies and an enhanced user experience, including implementing its full digital employee experience (DEX) capabilities.
They’ve recently rolled out Ivanti Neuron’s hyper-automation bots for service delivery. This has been game-changing for teams of busy lawyers who don’t have time to waste on IT service calls. Bots can identify and repair issues before they even become visible, which is proving to be a real benefit for the entire organisation - and to those billable hours!
“Time saving was the key driver that really got people excited about using bots,” Steve explains. “Our lawyers bill in roughly 6-minute increments so they have to really account for every period of time.”
Taking remote control of devices for maintenance used to be tricky because lawyers would get anxious about downtime and worry about protecting sensitive case files. By automating maintenance tasks using bots, IT is directly supporting the firm’s bottom-line and keeping that IP secure.
One example of a maintenance bot they’ve found extremely useful is around battery health: “We run a bot that scans each laptop and reports on its battery health. If it’s under 60% it sends an alert to our service desk.” This helps Steve’s team to seamlessly order and quickly fit a new battery, proactively managing the issue before the lawyer even knows they have one.
Another interesting bot they created is around Outlook profiles and proactively managing mailbox sizes. “Lawyers keep everything and their mail file sizes grow to well over 50 Gig,” Steve explains. That drags laptop performance down. File-size alerts allow the team to intelligently manage mailbox sizes, for example removing deleted items and recreating the user’s profile out of business hours, ensuring high performing devices and productivity.
Steve and his team ran a bots workshop with key decision-makers and tech teams, did some ticket analysis and chatted with teams to work out what which common manual tasks they could best automate going forward. They also looked at how to leverage the invaluable metrics that their device fleet generates.
They quickly identified the top ten services to automate: “We started simple and didn’t try and change the world,” Steve shares. It was an organic process and soon other people across the business, such as the server management team, began to ask if they could create their own bots.
Over 12-15 months, about 150 bots have been created at Gilbert + Tobin, each saving significant service call time, with issues immediately visible and quickly resolved. “They’re really easy to play with and build,” Steve shares, “even I can build them!”.
Help-desking is so often about firefighting, but Ivanti Neurons for ITSM has helped Steve change the game. “We’ve noticed a massive reduction in the number of incidents.” His team typically handles about 200 tickets per day and since using the automation bots the content of those tickets has massively shifted from flagging urgent IT incidents to positive service requests.
“I would say that at least 80% of those (tickets) now are service requests. I looked at one day’s data and only nine of our 204 tickets were actual incidents.”
Another unexpected benefit is that more junior IT staff are now able to take on more complex issues and more experienced IT staff are being reallocated from repetitive tasks.
Steve says: “They’re getting more exposure to more project work, participating in pilots, testing and getting involved in meatier stuff.” It’s helping the business scope out who in the team is likely to naturally progress and creates interesting opportunities which supports employee retention: a big focus for Gilbert + Tobin.
“If you’re sick of doing repetitive tasks manually, automation bots are the way to go.”
Steve concludes. The next step for him is to start incorporating a self-service element, which will deliver the next evolution in user experience.
“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 User Group 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.
