"Virtual Cabinet was recommended to Heritage by myself, as I used it at my previous employers where I found it to be incredibly user friendly."
Heritage Legal is based in Norwich and was formed back in 2002. Catering for all forms of estate planning, the firm has somewhere in the region of 40,000 clients, making it East Anglia’s largest Estate Planning Company.
The company sets itself apart from other businesses due to its niche offering. Competition-wise, Heritage Legal are competing with either firms of solicitors, which tend to be large enough to have their own lifetime planning department, or one-man-bands, which don’t offer a great deal of long-term certainty for clients. Heritage Legal therefore pride themselves on offering better value than corporate firms and providing more sustainability than smaller companies.
Stuart Burrell, Finance Director at Heritage Legal Will Writers, has been in the business for five years as a director, and ten years prior to that as an external accountant.
"Information is now at our fingertips."
- Stuart Burrell, Finance Director, Heritage Legal
In the legal industry, the biggest pain point is a lack of regulation. Companies like Heritage Legal are therefore always lobbying for regulation, and will always welcome it.
Before using Virtual Cabinet, Heritage’s other key problems included:
Stuart Burrell says that Virtual Cabinet has supported Heritage and his own work at the company in many ways:
“Having Virtual Cabinet helps me personally with remote working. The flexibility it provides supports me as I spend a lot of time out of the office with clients. It enables me to work from home or on the road, and provides me with access to all of my client’s documents on-the-go, wherever I am.”
“Virtual Cabinet was recommended to Heritage by myself, as I used it at my previous employers where I found it to be incredibly user friendly. While implementing change, there is also some resistance by staff, as going paperless is a seismic shift, but knowing how easy Virtual Cabinet was to use and the ease of integration with our current practice management system meant this was quickly overcome. If you’re going to pick a product, make sure it integrations and is user friendly.”
“Our field sales representatives also use the Virtual Cabinet Client Portal quite heavily to send all of their paperwork securely, including documents signed in the portal by clients.” “Another benefit from having implemented Virtual Cabinet is the time it takes to respond to a client.
The information is now at our fingertips, so we can answer their queries there and then on the phone rather than having to call them back once we have found their file. This has also enabled our admin team and reception team to resolve more queries, as they have instant and direct access to files.”
"Implementation of Virtual Cabinet was made painless thanks to the VC team."
- Stuart Burrell, Finance Director, Heritage Legal
“We’ve implemented several automated workflows using the Virtual Cabinet system, with our Probate department being the first to take it on board- and they loved it! We ran a paperless and a paper system side-by-side for three months to make sure everything ran smoothly, and from week one everyone in the team wanted to get rid of the paper!”
“Since the success within the Probate team, the automated workflows have been taken on by our Trust department and Solicitor arm as well. This enables processes to be much more effective, as having all the regulation side of the work automated makes their job a lot easier. Previously, we’d have to post all documents to them, but now it’s all in one system which they have access to, so there is a full audit trail in Virtual Cabinet.”
“We are running out of office space for personnel, and we have a filing room of around 50 filing cabinets. Within the next year to 18 months, we plan to empty the room, so we can sit another 8 to 10 people in it. This future-proofs us for a few more years, meaning we won’t have to look for new offices for a while. Everyone’s working areas can also be reduced, as they’re not going to have mountains of paper files stacked up on their desks”.
"Since the success within the Probate team, the automated workflows have been taken on by our Trust department and Solicitor arm."
- Stuart Burrell, Finance Director, Heritage Legal
“Very user friendly.”
