And the winner is Eversheds, with their widely focused Eversheds.complete portfolio of online services, providing "a toolkit" for staff and clients. This just pipped PwC on the basis of demonstrated competitive advantage.
Let’s hear more about how Eversheds.complete works.
A client-led advisory panel “the dotcom board” - specifies and reviews each component of the Eversheds.complete portfolio.
This currently includes news, industry knowledge bases (initially focused on Employment, HR and Commercial Property) and legal services (e.g. BRANDcomplete - a brand management service, calculators - Maternity Pay, Stamp Duty), extranets - private deal rooms/project rooms, online storage of scanned deeds and on-line training services.
Many of these services have been put together at relatively low development cost by using recognised industry partners (FT.com, Butterworths Lexis/Nexis, egi.co.uk (Estates Gazette), IBM/Lotus Quickplace, Sony VAIO).
Clients subscribe to the services and ... "although initially aimed at clients - the Knowledge Banks have become an indispensable tool for our own lawyers to keep up to date - literally to the minute on developments in the law."
Clients subscribe to Eversheds.complete (unlike many firms' free brochureware sites) and they currently have around 500 subscribers.
It can be very difficult for top law firms to differentiate themselves from their competitors. "Partners who attend competitive client presentations "are saying that time and time again this has given them something noticeably different to explain to the client and there has been universal positive response to this ... and that has enabled Eversheds to demonstrate a real differentiation and to gain clients and client transactions".
This is a worthwhile system, which is likely to prove a formidable challenge for the competition to match or beat.
Runner up is PricewaterhouseCoopers - pcweventzbooker.com. This is technically ahead of the pack; an innovative example of what all professional firms should be doing with most of their corporate purchasing - here focused on booking and tracking client corporate hospitality in the firm - a true extranet with three user interfaces for partners, event package suppliers and finance department, build to complement existing databases using a mixture of browser pages and e-mail.
In third place is Morgan Cole's with their compulsory on-line graduate recruitment application system. This saved money, eliminated paper CVs, produced faster responses, and led to an overall increase of about 20% in the number of applicants.