How William Roberts bolstered their legal research solutions with Lexis Advance^®

Background

William Roberts is a dynamic and innovative law firm with a focus on dispute resolution, litigation, and personal, commercial and property transactions. Since being founded in Sydney by Robert Ishak and Bill Pertrovski in 2005, the firm has grown steadily, now employing 60 people across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Singapore. The firm’s success has come from its singular focus on clients. By remaining committed to establishing and improving client relationships, William Roberts has expanded its remit and grown its client base.

Challenge

“We offer a broad range of expertise to our clients,” says Robert Ishak, Principal & Chairman at William Roberts Lawyers. “Ranging from Commercial Litigation to Bankruptcy and Insolvency, Contracts, Insurance, Class Actions, Consumer Protection and Civil Procedure. This presents us with a particular set of challenges when it comes to ensuring our lawyers have the best legal research tools available for our clients.” William Roberts adopts a hybrid approach to its legal research solutions, opting for a broad range of resources to acquire the knowledge lawyers need - and no doubt familiar to many other firms - they have a need to minimise time and cost expenditure for legal research.

Enter Lexis Advance.

The Solution

“Lexis Advance makes it easier to access cases and helps improve time efficiencies,” says Robert. “We’re also able to utilise the various tools and features to help understand the treatment of cases, and quickly find relevant legislation.” By doing this, Lexis Advance positively impacts the way William Roberts is able to deliver legal services to their clients.

"With the help of Lexis Advance, William Roberts can provide on-time and accurate advice to clients, frame legal issues, and analyse facts thoroughly."

The solution provides numerous efficiencies to William Roberts that specifically address the firm’s unique challenges. Things like being able to trace the thread of a particular legal principle; locate cases and relevant publications quickly; access headnote summaries to guide research avenues; and reference paragraphs to quickly identify other cases. All of this dovetails with the platform’s efficient navigation and recall speed to provide an efficient experience to clients.

“For example, when we work on a trust matter, we’re able to review the law through Halsbury’s® Laws of Australia, where we can reference legislation and cases of relevance,” says Robert.

"Through CaseBase® we can follow that thread to other relevant cases referring to the original case reviewed. This is a great way in which we can quickly and clearly access the resources we need during the research process."

Lexis Advance has provided significant benefit for William Roberts across five primary areas:

• Reducing legal costs for the firm
• Improving operational efficiency when searching for legal matters and list of authorities
• Consistent court compliance when submitting official reports for list of authorities
• Increased client satisfaction in terms of service delivery as a result of attention to research and client advice, and approach to matters
• Stronger knowledge sharing across the firm through collaboration and the folder sharing capabilities in Lexis Advance

"Our experience overall has been excellent."

“Not only does the product deliver and support our teams with legal research, but the customer service from LexisNexis is outstanding. Their email and phone support is rapid and effective, especially when a resource may be out of scope or when organising training seminars.”

Key Features for William Roberts

While there are many challenges intrinsic to the business of law as a whole, each firm has its own ways of working and its own unique means of undertaking its work. There are a range of features that William Roberts has found particularly valuable by using Lexis Advance.

• Quick find and Advanced Search as powerful tools to find relevant cases and links
• Treatment of cases, hyperlinked citations, and folder creation for knowledge sharing in CaseBase
• Email alerts keep the firm up to date with current developments and changes in practice areas
• Boolean searches, treatment tables and paragraph locator features
• Ability to colour search terms makes reviewing cases for relevance much more efficient
• Full case text on a single page makes the process of searching far easier

“The search history and advanced search features are the most useful,” says Robert. “In particular, the advanced search feature allows us to find case law that is relevant to a particular section of legislation - this is extremely useful in backing up an opinion
or realising that a paragraph has not seen much support.”

Overall? It’s fair to say Robert is a supporter of Lexis Advance. “LexisNexis promotes excellence in the legal profession. It streamlines our research and allows the saving of key cases for ease of recall and access.”

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