Salans

With 22 offices in 17 countries around the world, Salans is a responsive, flexible, law firm. Offering a range of services, the practice has around 80 lawyers working in its London office alone.

Dean Mason is the Library and Information Service (LIS) Manager in Salans’ London office. “The fee earners have a variety of information needs in relation to their client work. My role is to provide the relevant resources and a research service to assist,” he explains. As the only London-based employee working in this area, Dean’s workload is significant.

A new way to manage current awareness

Salans adopted Linex Smart Alerts in response to fee-earning lawyers receiving too much information, from too many disparate sources.

An initial survey of fee earners offered clear justification for change: “People were getting so much information they were spending up to two hours a week just reading their updates,” confirms Dean. “We realised that if we could reduce that time, we could help to boost fee earners’ productivity.

Connects with PLC and Lawtel

Lawyers at Salans use Lawtel and Practical Law Company (PLC) as their key sources of current awareness. “Linex has a PLC filtering service built in,” he elaborates. “It lets us generate bespoke content for our alerts.”

With this knowledge, and after evaluating other options, Dean settled on Linex as the most appropriate provider. “It seemed to be the most comprehensive and user friendly system,” he explains. “Also, the system is cost-effective and value for money is very good.”

Getting started with Linex

It didn’t take long for Salans to get up and running with Linex. The firm used the service to create custom email alerts, combining the most relevant information from several sources.

“I started off by setting up a trial group within the firm,” describes Dean. “I got some really positive feedback. Then, once we’d actually subscribed to the service, we rolled out department-specific emails. There was an investment in time initially, but now it’s set up, it runs itself.”

It wouldn’t be possible manually

“The survey showed us what our fee earners need: an email service that links into legal, company, industry and regulatory news. They need it as succinct, relevant and up-to-date as possible. With Linex, that’s what they’re getting.”