For 20 years, Reinhart Boerner Van Deuren s.c. has worked to instill a clear and simple mission in new associates: “Better Lawyers Faster.” It’s a motto that’s more timely than ever amidst the tumult in the legal market, as legal technology and increasingly parsimonious clients combine to squeeze law firms’ margins.
But it isn’t one that’s easy to implement. It takes time to train new associates — time many clients won’t pay for. And the hours spent by associates honing their craft — often reinventing the wheel, performing time-consuming and tedious research and drafting that’s been done countless times before by other lawyers — can’t be spent on other, potentially more profitable tasks.
Milwaukee-based Reinhart recently added a new resource to cut out that fat and make its associates’ work more valuable, both to the firm and its clients: Thomson Reuters Practical Law Connect, which unites Practical Law’s wealth of legal know-how with Westlaw’s authorities. Introduced to new firm members during associate orientation, the platform initially was met with some skepticism.
“To be honest, my first reaction was, ‘Another one of these?’” Nick Zuiker, an associate in Reinhart’s employee benefits practice, admitted. It’s an understandable response, given the large and growing number of electronic resources available to attorneys today. Helpful as many of those new tools are, their proliferation is a double-edged sword: Accessing the potentially valuable content in each requires learning new systems and, often, repetitive, duplicative searches across them — none of which makes the research process more efficient.
But as Zuiker quickly found, Practical Law Connect is different. “Practice Point has saved me an immense amount of time,” he said. “Everything is grouped together in such a way that I can get the answer I’m looking for quickly. With Practice Point, I can accomplish the same tasks that would take at least two or three other resources elsewhere.”
Practical Law Connect integrates the vast resources of Thomson Reuters, bringing together in one place Westlaw’s primary law content with Practical Law’s vast trove of practice notes, checklists, and model agreements, all of which are constantly being updated by more than 200 experienced, full-time attorneys ensuring the thousands of available documents are relevant and state of the art. In addition, the platform features a wealth of other resources, including West km, Business Law Center, Company Investigator, and Drafting Assistant Essential.
“We were confident our transactional attorneys would really like Practice Point,” Emily Gellings, a research specialist at Reinhart, said. “They already love Practical Law, so to be able to integrate it with Thomson Reuters Westlaw, our firm’s work product in West km, and other resources they may not even know existed, has been really advantageous for their practice.”
It’s easy to see why: Whereas associates might have otherwise spent a whole day or more crafting a buy-side agreement — researching the topic, rewriting an older, outdated version, and searching for the appropriate clauses — they now have everything at hand. What’s more, they won’t need to do dozens of repetitive searches to find it all. Practical Law Connect’s intuitive interface allows associates to quickly drill down to the right material through its innovative task-based browse menus. Within moments, one can click through the Corporate and M&A practice area to Draft and Negotiate Acquisition Agreements and have state-of-the-art templates to work with, as well as all the possible clauses and alternatives to consider and include. Hours of tedious, laborious work are reduced to a few clicks of a mouse.
“It’s set up in a way that they’re already thinking,” Gellings said. “It’s intuitive to go into a research product by a task, instead of doing a keyword search. This is much more how they think. Everything is laid out all in one place, so they’re not jumping around to different resources.”
“Having Practice Point puts tools at my fingertips to increase my efficiency,” Tristan Dollinger, a corporate law associate at the firm, said. “Directing my searches through the Practice Point browse menus has helped my efficiency a great deal. It acts as a double-check to make sure I’ve thought about all aspects of a particular issue.”
Zuiker agrees. “There have been numerous occasions when, using Practice Point, I find the answer, and then I see something else on the site, or just above or below, and say, ‘Oh, what about that?’ That’s an extremely useful resource.”
“It sometimes can be difficult to remember where to find what we need,” Carol Bannen, Reinhart’s director of information resources, said. “With Practice Point, we now have access to many of the resources we subscribe to, all in one place.
It all adds up to Better Lawyers Faster, according to Reinhart senior shareholder Kevin Howley. “We don’t go after every shiny new technology, but when we find something that can make us more effective, we’re ready to invest,” he said. “Practice Point enables us to bring associates up to a higher level faster, and be better contributors to the work product. The result is a better product and better results for the client.”
Learn more about Practical Law Connect and how it can work for you.