How Exizent is helping Hughes Parry Solicitors save time in a growing probate sector.
| Company Name | Hughes Parry Solicitors |
|---|---|
| Company Type | General Practice |
| Company Size | 7 employees |
| Probate Department | 2 employees |
| Office Locations | Holywell, North Wales |
When Hughes Parry Solicitors underwent a firm reorganisation, Director Tim Wilson took on the responsibility for probate work across the firm. With a background in Divorce and Family work, Tim needed a simple solution to track all his new probate cases and turned to Exizent Software to help improve the visibility and accuracy of his clients’ cases, as well as the speed taken to solve them.
Established in 1996, Hughes Parry Solicitors comprises of a team of specialists serving the people and businesses of North Wales and beyond. They offer most types of legal services but specialise in divorce and family, conveyancing/property, powers of attorney, advising the elderly and wills and probate.
Since June 2021, Solicitor and Director Tim Wilson took on the responsibility for Probate cases across the firm and needed a good way of keeping tabs of all the cases and their particulars. His research led to the realisation that many lawyers to date use excel spreadsheets to manage all the details within a probate case – a laborious and sometimes inaccurate method.
“I contacted a number of probate practitioners who all said they just used spreadsheets. They input all their client data into separate spreadsheets and manage them that way. However, one recommended a demo of Exizent’s platform so I contacted Exizent and, upon learning about the platform, thought ‘this could be really useful – a simple, visible tool to stay on top of client work”
Tim approached Exizent with the hope of attaining a foolproof system to capture all the information necessary to manage and solve his client’s cases. He wanted a simpler, more visible way to see what was going on – the information they had about a case, if any information was missing etc., that didn’t require him to set up numerous excel formulas or cipher through a multitude of excel spreadsheets – making the process easier to manage and the information quicker to process.
Tim was, from the off, impressed with the Exizent dashboard, where he could see all his cases in one place, and click into each individual case to see tiles showing the different assets.
‘I needed a system which wasn’t just working off spreadsheets and when I saw the Exizent system and the tiles which showed, for example, that a client has one property, two motor vehicles, three bank accounts etc., I thought this was a good way of capturing, maintaining and not losing any information.’
Working with the platform
While Hughes Parry originally selected the Exizent platform to capture client data and easily see cases and assets in one place they’re now reaping a number of benefits from the software. With just one Supervisor and one Legal Assistant working as part of their probate team, it’s often difficult to keep on top of each individual case to know which ones are being discussed at a given time. However, with Exizent they don’t have to. The platform enables the two team members to save time memorising or filing through numerous documents to differentiate between cases by opening up a visual dashboard that has the information easily displayed in front of them – saving both effort and time.
“As a supervisor it’s great because I can get an overview immediately of each case we’re working on. In probate it can sometimes be difficult to differentiate the details of one case from another as there is so much paperwork and information coming into the office every day. But with Exizent everything is really easy to see so I don’t need to rely upon my memory, file notes or spreadsheets as everything is captured on the case’s dashboard on Exizent.”
Another benefit Hughes Parry are getting from the platform is a reduced risk of forgotten or lost client data. The platform enables professionals to create tiles based on what they think a deceased had – i.e. a bank account with the Yorkshire Building Society, without needing to know the amount that was in it. You can simply create a tile and leave it blank until the information is collated which means it’s visible and not forgotten.
‘I’ve got my numerous probate files open on a screen and I can click into one or another and see immediately about the house, the bank accounts, any cash ISA’s, premium bonds etc. I can also set up for example, a premium bond tile as 0 while we wait for that number to come back – but that tile is created so it won’t be forgotten.’
“The dashboard is also much easier to go in and out of than searching through a spreadsheet on a file or number of files, to work out which is the most up to date. With Exizent, it’s one dashboard with the most up-to-date figures.”
When it comes to probate work, legal teams often spend a significant amount of time filling in numerous IHT forms by hand. However, Hughes Parry now save a significant amount of time per case by having the information they input from one form automatically transferred across to the others in the click of a button. This significantly reduces the potential of human error across the different forms, while again saving time working on a case – reducing cost for all parties involved.
The future of Probate at Hughes Parry
5 months in, and Hughes Parry have numerous open probate cases within the firm which they manage on the platform. Tim has high hopes for taking on more cases in the future – thanks to the help of technologies like Exizent save them an increasing amount of time in a growing sector.
‘We don’t currently advertise any of our services. We receive a lot of work from previous clients and through ‘word of mouth’ recommendations. Probate is one of the things that we do and one of the things that we’d like to do more of, and I do see this changing in the future as Exizent helps us save more time assisting with estate accounts – putting them all in one place, generating the estate accounts excel sheet time and generating the probate IHT forms.’
“What I like about the Exizent software is that it’s a new and developing system. Since I started using it 5 months ago things have been added and altered to help solicitors work more effectively.
In fact, adopting the system in the early stages of its journey has allowed me to ask questions about the current functionality and have a say over how it’s being developed. I’ve been able to ask ‘why does that do that? Because for a practitioner that’s not great’ and then that element has been tweaked to my suggestion. I’ve been able to have a real sway over the future of this product to help more practitioners like myself operate more efficiently in future.”