From Paper to Profits How IMS Legal Strategies Unlocked New Revenue Streams with Microsoft Emerging Technologies

From Paper to Profits How IMS Legal Strategies Unlocked New Revenue Streams with Microsoft Emerging Technologies Thu, Nov 14, 2024 10:32AM • 25:48 SUMMARY KEYWORDS IMS Legal Strategies, Microsoft technologies, online survey platforms, jury research, mock trials, data visualization, Power Platform, Power BI, client portal, witness evaluation, digital transformation, Power Automate, Dataverse, AI technology, business goals 00:00 Welcome everybody. I'm excited to be here and talking with you just to introduce myself. I'm a consulting manager here at velocio, and I lead what we call our apps and automation team. And we focus on building apps building automation to help your business, to fill gaps, and, you know, increase your your operational efficiencies and all kinds of different, different things that we that we do, and I'm excited to talk to some fantastic guests. Today. We have Rebecca and Kevin. Rebecca from IMS legal strategy, and Kevin is from velocity. Oh, he's part of the velocity team that implemented the solution we're going to be talking about for IMS. IMS is a professional services firm that partners with law firms corporations worldwide to elevate their legal strategies. And today we're going to be talking about, you know, how we've we've worked together. Rebecca will be sharing her experience with volatil and how we've helped IMS legal strategies to implement a variety of Microsoft technologies that are helping to address their business needs. And you know, Kevin's going to help to provide some insight from the implementation perspective. You know what it's like working working with our team. So before we dive too much into the details about what actually you know we did, but I want to focus, or start with Rebecca and see if you can tell us a little bit about your role at IMS and maybe how your company is supporting law firms. Yeah, 01:40 absolutely. First of all, thank you, Aaron, for inviting me. It's great to be here with you and Kevin, as you said, I work for IMS legal strategies. Our team works with law firms and corporate clients across the nation and around the world to provide trial preparation services, including expert witness placement consulting services such as litigation consulting, visual advocacy and presentation technology. My role in particular, is within the consulting services department. I help lead and support key initiatives and business strategies such as the advantage 02:14 Awesome, awesome. And so I want to kind of think back to 2018 when we first started talking and working together. Can you talk a little bit about what prompted you to explore a new solution? You know? What? What event or challenge were you? Were you facing that kind of led to this? Yeah, 02:35 it was really when we started to see online survey collection platforms back in 2018 and it got us thinking about how we could integrate online surveys into our jury research workflow, especially around mock trials and focus groups, reducing at the time what was a largely manual, paper driven process for mock jurors, our teams and our client, we would literally dig through stacks of paperwork and questionnaires to understand monitor responses, making tallies, creating PowerPoints from those tallies, to be able to share highlights with our clients. And we knew there had to be a more innovative way of being able to provide that information. So that was the real challenge or opportunity that we saw at that time, 03:20 awesome. And so as you were starting to explore and look for, you know, solutions or alternatives, what did you consider? What, what applications or or other, you know, offerings were you looking at? 03:35 Yeah, we looked at several online survey applications and platforms like Survey Monkey Qualtrics, as well as Microsoft forms Pro, now known as dynamics customer voice, finding an online survey platform was the easy part. The hard part was finding a platform that could provide an output of the mocker data and responses in an interesting, meaningful way. Microsoft forms Pro was probably the closest to what we were looking for. The visual output was interesting, but lacked some of the detail that we wanted. Being in Seattle, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to speak with a Microsoft business partner to learn about Microsoft forms Pro, and she suggested working with a developer that could help customize the solution for the level of analysis and detail that we were looking for. We met with several companies that she recommended, including velasio, and ultimately we selected velasio. What we appreciate about working with velasio, appreciate at the time about velasio Was your proposal was straightforward in terms of cost, what the solution would be and deliverables, we knew exactly who we'd be working with on the project, other developers we had the opportunity with at the time, the proposals weren't quite as straightforward in terms of cost. The people we were speaking with weren't necessarily the team going to be developing the solution, and that was an important part of our decision. So. 04:59 Yeah, well, we're really glad that you chose to work with us, and it's been a lot of fun over the last few years. Are there any other details that you want to share about the kind of the initial discussions that we had between valacio and IMS and the other key considerations? 05:14 Yeah, absolutely, in our initial discussions with velasio, really, the focus was on understanding our client needs and the client journey. Key considerations included finding a solution that could integrate seamlessly into our existing systems and methodologies, with an ability to provide advanced data visualization and analysis tools for our team and our client. It's one of the things I appreciate about working with you all to this day, five years later, is every person I've had the opportunity to work with. Falacio really wants to understand the client journey so they can identify an effective solution for us. At every turn, oftentimes, you guys deliver something better than we envision. Really where we started five years ago, designing the advantage and what we've developed to this day is innovative and exciting. Seeing how our clients love the ability to analyze, drill down, gain insight, not only during their jury research project, but through the life of their case, is a real benefit to our clients. 06:16 Yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome. All right, so I want to kind of switch and ask Kevin a couple questions. If you don't mind Rebecca and Kevin, I think we just want to kind of focus on the on the process. You know, what is it? What is it like to work with velocity on a project like this? You know, Rebecca is talking about, kind of the the way things have evolved in the last few years. But can you talk a little bit to that, and maybe any you know, kind of key cap, key challenges, or, you know, successes that that we have along the way? 06:52 Sure, so, so typically, we would start off with having some kickoff calls, some design sessions, discuss our process. We'll just, you know, kind of listen to the IMS team to, you know, discover some of their challenges, some of the things they want. They're really good at providing us with some, some inputs and outputs and and some, some of their vision. So during the calls, we've discussed the visuals requirements, specifications, and then we'll go back and forth and talk about our opinions, and we'll schedule kind of a plan of attack. So after our team has had a chance to build out some of these developmental phases, we open it up to this the solution to Rebecca's team, so they can test it out and validate so taking manual and paper processes and transforming them into digital is something that our DPS team is used to providing solutions for. We came up with a number of possible solutions and ideas to help solve the puzzles and bring their legacy processes to a modern and centralized location. Some original ideas were to build out teams, channels, custom Candace apps and other supporting processes. But eventually we landed on a full, a full Microsoft Power power platform, Dataverse solution. So along with that, and many other of the Microsoft supported tools, including Power BI the power platform and the d3 65 customer voice, which was Microsoft forms Pro are great tools to build upon. It's a bonus knowing that the power platform capabilities are always expanding. Microsoft is always adding different capabilities, new new updates, new things that you know five years ago weren't even, weren't even an idea, wasn't even something we knew was possible. So it's always been, it's always been a great thing, knowing that the power platform is always growing, 08:54 which kind of becomes the challenge and something that could, yeah, causing success, right? Like, sure, yeah, absolutely. The tools. Change the methods, you know, we get a better way to do something and and we discover that we can, we can build out something that's, that's, that's new, this better provides more value. So it's, yeah, it's a fun process that can be challenging, but also it can be very rewarding. Can you talk just about how these, these different tools we're talking about, kind of throwing out some Microsoft lingo, right? We'll throw out the the acronyms and the names, the change with the wins sometimes. But can you talk a little bit how those, those tools we're talking about may integrate together, or can kind of fit into what IMS has in their ecosystem. Yeah. 09:46 So the advantage solution was mostly meant to replace, you know, that paper and manual processes. So we definitely needed that digital transformation. We did have to build some integrations between a website that IMS had. Had jurors signed up on a website, and they needed to appear in the app somehow. So so we had a process to get those jury selections into the app. So we worked with developers of the website and came up with a method to seamlessly push the jury records from the website and into the Dataverse. Power automate was an obvious choice to build that integration. It's currently being used extensively throughout the advantage for a variety of uses, including the integration and also transforming data throughout the data versus data is being entered and manipulated. 10:36 Cool, awesome. All right, so I think we're gonna talk a little bit more about specifically kind of what was what was built. But maybe before we do that, Rebecca, can you talk just a little bit about what it's like to bring something new like this to your team? Right? You kind of have have something that you need to train people on, that you need to get them familiar with and and get adoption right. We want, we don't want to build something and then have nobody use it. So can you talk a little bit about that? What was it like approaching it? Approaching 11:13 absolutely one of the key things that that we did in the initial development and continue to do as we continue to build out the advantage and the enhancements is we involve key stakeholders in the design and through each step of the development, and it really is for their buy in this really helped with the solution in terms of change management process and adapting to integrate new workflows With our larger team, we also used a phased approach around training and integration. This really helped us to refine systems, develop experts that really could support the team at full implementation. You know, valacio was very supportive through each transition, enabling a test environment where our team can train and practice with various tools and enhancements we built to feel more comfortable and confident in their workflow. 12:07 Awesome. Yeah, that's that's critical that we have a playground, we have a testing area, and that we can, we can follow the right steps to ensure that we're, we're catching the things that we haven't, we haven't caught, and that we're keeping things, keeping things as stable as possible for our end users. All right, so I think it's time we're going to talk a little bit deeper about kind of the impact of this project. Maybe Rebecca, if you can start with, what is the advantage? Can you explain that a little bit Absolutely? 12:42 Well, the advantage continues to evolve. We initially developed the advantage to offer our clients an interactive experience, visualizing mock jury data in a powerful way, giving our clients meaningful and actionable insights during their jury research projects, and we continue to invest in in the tools and the flexibility around the advantage to meet the unique needs of our clients. Projects. In the last year, we developed a client portal where clients can access their advantage dashboard the day of the project and really through the life of their case. We developed a witness evaluation tool where you can dive into juror evaluations of key witnesses in the case and compare their credibility assessments against our extensive historical witness data. These enhancements have provided unique tools for our clients and our teams and offer invaluable insight 13:39 that's awesome. Kevin, can you talk maybe a little bit about what's under the covers? You know? What did, how did velocity of support building this out? 13:50 Yeah, so at velocity, oh, we have several internal contacts on our team that are that are familiar with the advantage solution. I've generally in the in the past couple years been, been the point of contact for quick, quick enhancements, modifications to the Model Driven app, the Canvas pages, the Canvas app portal, Power BI dashboard. But depending on the level of effort for the enhancement, we may end up putting together a project designed specifically to track those enhancements. We may help. We, we definitely hold regular stand up calls to make sure the IMS team and the and the velocity teams are in sync on what needs to happen and when for those larger efforts. We, we generally include project managers from both velocity team and IMS team. They help keep accountability, scheduling and organizational expectations, some of my favorite enhancements to the advantage solution is when Rebecca just pings me on teams and gives me a scenario to a problem they'd like to solve, and we just pick up our headsets and start brainstorming. 14:53 That's fine, and the converse is true. Kevin will ping me in teams and say, Hey, I found something really cool I want to show you. So as you talked about the, you know, the platforms continue to evolve and change and offers new solutions, and it's, it's been a lot of fun in its development. Yeah, 15:09 yeah. Again, that's the that's the challenge, but also the reward, or the fun of it is, is trying to keep on top of of everything that's that's coming out, and the way the product is is shifting and improving, which it's done a lot of Since 2018 So, yeah, yeah. So this is, this is really cool. I guess maybe Rebecca, if you can talk a little bit about how this directly impacted your your teams, you maybe, maybe it's your customer, or maybe it's kind of your internal your colleagues, but how did this help improve their their daily work experience? Absolutely, 15:48 one of the best aspects of the advantage, really, is the wow factor it gives clients. It's a unique experience that differentiates us from our competition. So from a marketing perspective, the innovation has been the edge. The project has also improved the internal client experience by automating some manual processes, including time spent on data entry analysis, creating visualizations of data that are now at their fingertips, enhancing the overall efficiency and effectiveness of our services. 16:22 Awesome and so Kevin, maybe, if you can talk a little bit about some specific kind of, maybe things that you've seen that that have been streamlined, you know, after implementing or being a part of this project for a number of years, what are, what are some of those school things that you've seen, we've been able 16:42 to improve. Yeah. So I have a couple of favorites. One of, one of my favorite enhancements to the advantage solution is the implementation of the direct link direct sync to Microsoft fabric. So the ability to have a shortcut call straight to the lake enhances the ability to get the very fast data refreshes from the advantage dashboard. So at one point, we had a 15 to 20 minute delay before the clients and consultants were able to see the data in the dashboard. The hope on the AMS team was always to have the ability to get instant results, or near instant results, to the clients, so they can see the data changes in the dashboard almost as it happens with this new direct link between the Dataverse and fabric, we can now get the model to refresh in about 90 seconds or less. So that means the IMS consultants and the and the clients can see the juror survey results almost immediately. Another one of my favorites is the implementation of the power pages portal we recently implemented before having Microsoft fabric SKU IMS, didn't have a great way to share dashboards to the clients. The method we originally set up was to have 15 or so temporary accounts that were handed out to clients so they could see the dashboard the day of and a few days after the project was over, but after that, we had to pass that, that membership role to someone else. So with the implement implementation of the power pages portal and Microsoft fabric clients, can now use their own permanent logins to access their projects and view the reports for a much, much longer, extended period of time. 18:25 Those are both pretty cool. I like both of those, all right, so I think we've got maybe kind of two more, two more, kind of big questions. So Rebecca, I want to start, start with you. And I'd like to know maybe if you can talk us through how this has helped to achieve your, your broader business goals at IMS, you know what? What were some of those measurable results that you've you've seen since implementing the solution? And you know, if there's anything quantitative or qualitative, you know that you can that you can look to, 19:06 and I would say this project has been invaluable in helping us achieve our business goals by improving the client experience, enabling us to adapt quickly to client needs and requests, and offering an experience that is unlike our competitors. So really, just fundamentally, it's really supported the broader business goals and our interaction with the client and our client engagement, 19:31 awesome. That's great. And so then, what's next? That's my last question. What's next for this project? Where are we going? You know, what's Is there a future, future roadmap? Maybe Rebecca, if you want to kind of start with what you see there, and then Kevin, let you add in if you have anything. 19:51 There are several phases currently being planned, including further leveraging our historical data, which will offer our clients. But. Or insight around aspects of their case. We're looking at how to integrate other service offerings. So there's one platform for all of their consulting and advisory services are kind of our two, two big focuses right now. 20:14 Very cool. Kevin, any anything there that you want to add to and what you see in the future, maybe from a technical Yeah, perspective, yeah. I 20:22 mean, it's what I love about IMS. They're always thinking ahead. They're always trying to come up with new ways and better ways to help their processes and help their clients. So on, both Rebecca's team and the velocity team, we're always trying to find new ways to grow, become and have the advantage become the best it can be. We have existing plans in place to also enable AI technology to generate useful and informative visuals without having the required knowledge it would normally take together those insights and something like Power BI we're also working on with the IMS team to and their analytics team to to to help generate statistical analysis of the data they're acquiring over those over those several years that Rebecca just mentioned. 21:08 Very cool. So starting to really, again, make use of all this, this data that you've got Rebecca and and produce more value back to back to your end customer, 21:19 absolutely. And I'm in a much more efficient output than currently we have right now. So we're really looking forward to to these next phases with you. All 21:28 Awesome. All right, well, I think we've kind of hit the end of my, my, my questions. I think we're gonna move into seeing if there's any kind of Q and A, and then we'll, we'll after, after that. We'll kind of end with some, end with some final remarks, whatever we we feel like we need to, to put a cap on this. But anything Rebecca or Kevin that you guys want to add to this overall discussion about this advantage solution and the results that we've 22:04 seen. You know, I think, for me, I think it's really just finding a partner like we found in velasio to other professional firms out there, leaning in on innovation, continuing to try and kind of push the quality of service offerings and automation you can create to find better solutions. We definitely feel we have that great rapport with our teams. We know that you understand our core business processes and goals, and we have very much a trust in finding good solutions together. It's the only, only thing I would add, 22:40 Oh, that's awesome. Oh, again, yeah, I think we love working with your team and and pushing the pushing the boundaries of what what we can do. So Natalie, do we have any any questions? 22:57 No, we don do not have any questions. I love it when we answer all the questions. 23:02 We must have been really thorough, right? Okay, well, maybe just to close it out, I mean, Rebecca, thank you so much for joining and talking with us. Kevin, you as well. This has been a really fun project to work with you on over the last five or six, however many years it's been and yeah, I think I'm just really proud of what we've been able to accomplish. And so I Yeah, do you have kind of any, any final, final closing statements, Rebecca or Kevin, you know, anything maybe you would, you would recommend to others, or any advice that you'd offer somebody's looking to go through a process like this? 23:45 Yeah, I think, I think the key thing, as I mentioned, is really just finding that trusted partner, finding a provider or a partner that you know you really trust, that you have that kind of business relationship with, that really wants to understand your client, your needs and your client journey, to be able to fulfill that journey with you. So, so, yeah, 24:07 awesome. Kevin got anything? 24:11 I just gotta say, I just love working with the IMS team. It's just, it's always a pleasure working with Rebecca and her team, and I love seeing the mock ups of things that they envision and say, Hey, can we get this? Can we get the output to look like this? And I just love the challenge of making that happen. 24:30 Yeah, that back and forth is what we need right to make each other better. So absolutely alright, yeah. Well, thank you so much, Kevin Rebecca, for sharing your insights today, we truly appreciate you taking the time to discuss this project and Rebecca your experience with velocio and the impact it's had for your business so everybody. We also appreciate you joining and listening in if you do want to listen, if. You want to learn more about all these technologies that we've talked about today and how they might be able to help you transform, transform your business. We're going to be sharing some links to book meetings in the chat if you want to book a call to talk to talk to my team and explore what you know a problem that you're facing, and what we might be able to help you, help you solve. Look for that. You can also send an email to [email protected] or you can call this number on on the screen right there. But thank you everybody, and we'll see you next time. 25:41 Thank you. 25:41 Thank you. Thank.