BEST CLIENT SERVICE INNOVATION 2018

KennedysWINNER

A major part of Kennedys’ recent strategic growth and vision is its investment in innovation, evidenced by a growing range of products, services and joint ventures all designed to enhance client service. The firm is best known for its insurance sector focus, where clients are used to working to tight margins and indemnity spend, including legal defence costs, can have a significant impact on the bottom line. Kennedys solution is KLAiM, a unique online litigation tool that empowers clients to settle insurance claims that are in dispute without needing to instruct a lawyer and which was designed to assist insurers and organisations managing insurance claims in-house. KLAiM helps clients control and reduce legal defence costs through a proprietary workflow, avoiding defence fees entirely for up to 75 per cent of litigated cases. In the months since its launch a number of insurers such as Admiral, AXA and ERS adopted KLAiM while up to 75 per cent of cases managed via KLAiM were successfully settled. In total KLAiM saved clients £400,000 in legal costs last year, a figure Kennedys expects to treble this year. Judges said: “I liked this entry a lot. A niche client market and niche products developed with a clear commitment to innovation. The fact that, for example, KLAiM has been adopted by some of the biggest insurers speaks volumes.

Highly commended: TLT

In 2017 TLT saw an opportunity to use technology to improve the speed and efficiency of a core part of any legal team’s work – contract negotiation. It recognised that with in-house teams under pressure to achieve more with less and an opportunity to focus their time on being more strategic, this area was ripe for innovation. TLT came up with a new approach to guiding clients through the contract negotiation process called “combined intelligence”, designing a unique solution for contract negotiation called TLT LegalSifter that combines the power of AI with in-built legal advice from the firm’ lawyers. Judges said: “TLT’s online contract review tool must be a GC’s dream: it offers instant AI review along with access to TLT lawyers who wrote the play book. A great way to do more with less and to embed a legal team with its clients.”

Commended: BLM

BLM is commended for its range of innovations relating to combatting an epidemic of fraudulent travel sickness-related claims that risk having a significant impact on businesses in the travel industry. For one customer alone BLM’s initiatives helped transform its claims handling processes resulting in its fraud-related savings increasing from zero to an expected £50m for the initial 12-month period from the firm’s new process implementation. Judges said: “This is impressive client service – identifying a future need and going above and beyond to address it in a specialist sector.”