Success story DAS Rechtsbijstand
Correspondence with ITP embraced by critical lawyers of DAS Legal Aid Insurance
The customer: Das Legal Aid Insurance
DAS stands for accessible, professional, legal services and believes that expertise and reliability are of the utmost importance. DAS’s four hundred lawyers deal with more than 85.000 individual and company cases per year. These cases cover a huge variety of subjects on personal and social issues: from domestic quarrels, job dismissals, conflicts regarding building permits and cash investments, to discussions about traffic accidents. Thanks to its size and quantity of cases DAS has extensive legal knowledge and is able to apply important trends and developments in the legal area. DAS wants to make this knowledge available to the public. Obviously to help people prevent legal mishaps and conflicts, but also to solve legal conflicts.
The decision: lawyers at DAS need to have the possibility to adapt texts to their own situation and clients
As an insurance company specialized in legal aid, their services are financed by the paid insurance premium. This situation is completely different in comparison to legal offices where the actual amount of hours of work can be invoiced to their clients.
This is why working efficiently and being aware of actual expenses has been normal practise for DAS from the very beginning. This does not mean that the company delivers services of a lesser quality. However the administrative organisation is being looked at critically. This is also the reason why DAS thought it essential to automate the word processing and correspondence production. Using a document composition system the correspondence is automated by using standard texts which can be adapted and/or completed where necessary.
The introduction of ITP was first implemented in the Legal Services department, since this is where most of the correspondence is composed. Equally as important is the fact that this department consists of a group of very critical users who will not accept just any standard text for the creation of correspondence. Lawyers in particular want to have the possibility to adapt pre defined texts to their own situation and clients. Since the implementation and the deployment went so successfully, the ITP system sold itself within the DAS organisation and will be used in the future throughout the whole company. To achieve this, in an efficient manner, Aia Software proposed ITP/OnLine Server. In this way DAS was able to meet the need for an interactive and flexible document composition system.
The new solution: one central ITP server in Amsterdam and a SaaS-solution for the regional offices
A choice was made to implement ITP/OnLine Server so that management is done centrally and users can access the documents through a browser. ITP/OnLine Server offered DAS the possibility to work centralized as well as decentralized. For the quite new offices Groningen and Roermond there has been chosen for one central ITP/OnLine Server in the head office. The existing offices in Arnhem, Den Bosch and Rijswijk operate decentralized with their own ITP server. The offices in Groningen en Roermond can now use the ITP server through an ASP or SaaS model. In addition ITP/OnLine Server offers the possibility to set up and manage digital files. The documents created by ITP are saved and archived. Letters are immediately digitally signed and later on centrally printed and posted by the mail room. Other options are for instance forwarding documents internally for additional approval or the possibility to add the document to an existing file. Also incoming documents are scanned in the central mail room and sent to ITP as an attachment to a certain file.
The core of the case: what is the effect of the ITP software solution on the business within DAS?
Working with this ITP model provides DAS an enormous gain in terms of costs savings, efficiency improvement and quality control. For the users it is an easy accessible application to quickly and easily generate documents. In practice lawyers and mediators open a browser and choose from a menu which document to compose in the standard text processing program. For instance client and file data are added here, according to previous agreements and procedures. Since ITP offers extensive interaction with the users, the standard generated documents can be edited and be turned into a bespoke document. Therefore for each text block in each document, it is set up to allow specific users to make alterations.
Caty Both and Lindert Jan Kuijs, both Advisors ICT and Processes with DAS: “From practical experience and insight we have been able to fine tune the system and documents. A good product naturally produces all kinds of wishes. The collaboration with Aia Software is very satisfying and we expect to experience mutual benefits in the long term. We have chosen Aia Software’s ITP/OnLine Server, because the product is good, but especially because of the positive feeling the collaboration gives us. We had specifically been looking for a partnership which would create a win-win feeling for both parties.”