Question
How is Pinnacle helping its customers with new business intake? At what point in the client lifecycle should data capture for the NBI process start?
- Bracewell LLP
Answer
We are helping firms in a myriad of ways.
- We have a real strength in Anti-Money Laundering and KYC and are increasingly working with US based firms to reduce the burden of KYC compliance. We have developed thinking and associated forms and workflows which allows firms to undertake and record the necessary risk assessments and for these risk assessments to drive the evidence collection requirements. The evidence collection requirements change in the Open forms based on the entity type (private company, partnership or trust etc), the jurisdiction and the risk assessment. The risk leadership simply configure the evidence requirements to the firm standards.
- Working with some of the largest law firms in the world has forced us to solve issues created around Framework Agreements, Panel Appointments and OCGs. We have developed Client Specific Questions: A toolset which changes the questions asked at matter inception based on the client’s group. The questions displayed and the dropdown list values in the questions are driven by the client that has been selected. A request for a Shell matter will have Shell’s questions and Shell’s dropdown list items; we have also been working recently with three very large firms to ensure that the Rates and Payers applied to matters at creation are the correct ones.
- Key to Risk Management and New Business Intake are data quality and integration. Our expertise with 3E means that we have developed very deep integrations and our ability to create our own processes within 3E means that we don’t create duplicates and the integrity of the 3E data is maximised.
For some firms we are helping them at the Pitching stage; it is tedious to win work that you cannot execute due to conflicts etc. so some firms create non-billable pitch matters using the NBI process; others create the matter at this stage but only allow non-billable time codes. These requests are conflict checked as a normal matter would be. The pitch request and its associated clearance analysis is then ported across when the matter becomes billable and a new billable matter request is needed. In some firms, a quick conflict check would be run before any meeting that was expected to lead to an opportunity being surfaced. There are other firms that would add target clients to the NBI process – flagging targets so that they don’t get conflicted out whilst the rest of the firm is pursuing them.