Macfarlanes

Macfarlanes is a London law firm. Founded in 1875, it has grown to its current size of 74 partners and 150 solicitors without ever merging with another practice.

Proud of its independence, the firm attracts a broad range of clients, from leading companies and ambitious start-ups to private individuals.

Diverse information needs

Macfarlanes relies on Linex Smart Alerts to deal with demanding information requirements and help fee earning lawyers find relevant information.

The firm uses the Linex service to filter news and updates from many information sources. Key stories are converted into standard RSS feeds, which Macfarlanes has integrated directly into its intranet.

This means that the firm’s lawyers can see the latest news relating to their clients by checking a single intranet page. They don’t have to view different websites or wait for information to be distributed manually.

Key information in the right format

Kim Mclachlan is the firm’s senior information officer. As she explains, Macfarlanes introduced Linex as part of a wider project: “We were redeveloping our intranet. Before then we didn’t have anything providing automatic feeds. We used to rely on labour intensive newspaper searches.”

Macfarlanes soon saw benefits from Linex. “It keeps fee earners up to date with client business and what’s going on,” continues Kim. “It helps them monitor key clients and to create a more bespoke service – we’re able to keep on top of anything that might affect our clients.”

“It really speeds things up, allowing us to search a lot more content for a greater number of clients. And it has made life easier for the support staff, because they were doing searches manually before.”

A full choice of news sources

With its broad client base, Macfarlanes needs to monitor a wide range of news sources. Kim sees this as one of the real strengths of the service.

“Linex have been really good at combining their standard sources with our own requests,” she confirms. “We monitor some specific organisations and they’ve indexed content from them. In all, they have been easy to work with and extremely responsive to our comments and requests.”

In fact, buoyed by the success so far, Kim plans to deepen the firm’s use of Linex. “We’re into our second year now, and we’re looking to pull information from LexisNexis into Linex. Alongside feeds from our existing database, that will let us show current awareness on our intranet.”

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