CRM CASE STUDY

A CRM for the Legal Profession

How a Growing Law Firm Proved the Case for Agility at Scale with monday.com

 

Meet Howard Kennedy

 

Howard Kennedy is a full-service law firm based in London, renowned for providing straightforward legal advice to entrepreneurial businesses and individuals on both domestic and international matters. The firm employs over 450 people, including more than 150 lawyers, all working from a single location. With a growing team, Howard Kennedy is well-equipped to handle a wide range of legal challenges for its clients.

 

 

“The ability to see a clear picture of priorities across all departments and monitor precisely how each feeds into the three-year strategic plan is brilliant!” Tony McKenna | IT Director | Howard Kennedy

The Challenge

Howard Kennedy prides itself on deeply understanding each client’s business, market, and goals to deliver practical legal advice that helps them grow. As part of their own growth strategy, the firm has ambitious plans, as Tony McKenna, IT Director at Howard Kennedy, explains:

“After a record year of growth, our aim is to increase our revenue from £55 million to £80 million over the next three years. This will involve ongoing investment in both people and technology.”

To achieve this, the firm developed a three-year strategic vision, emphasizing the importance of leveraging digital solutions to drive growth. However, to bring this vision to life, they needed every team member to understand how their work aligned with the firm’s overall direction.

That’s when Tony and his team turned to monday.com to help communicate and execute their business strategy effectively.

The Solution

Why monday.com? Howard Kennedy had already been using monday.com for agile management of client work, but they soon realized the platform could play a much broader role in their operations. By expanding its use across the business, monday.com became a tool not only for capturing high-level strategy but also for managing specific objectives and key results (OKRs) across all departments.

Tony noted, “After some discussion, we agreed that monday.com was the best way to communicate our strategy and align every team’s daily tasks and projects with the firm’s long-term goals.”

Previously, teams worked well on individual priorities, but they lacked a holistic view of how their work connected to the larger strategy. monday.com allowed the firm to bridge this gap, ensuring everyone was aligned.

Every Department on the Same Page

To meet its aggressive growth targets, it was crucial that all departments worked together on priorities that supported the firm’s strategic goals. Led by legal services and supported by business development, operations, IT, and other teams, Howard Kennedy used monday.com to plan and execute business priorities, keeping everyone aligned and informed.

Tony explained, “We broke down the strategic plan into actionable steps for each practice area and linked them with the relevant business service teams. These boards are all connected and tied back to our overall strategic plan.”

With synchronized dashboards accessible on any device, board members could easily get an overview of progress, while managers could drill down into the details of individual departments and teams.

Agility in the Face of Challenges

As an agile business, Howard Kennedy needed the ability to adapt quickly to changing circumstances, both internal and external. For example, Tony highlighted the growing threat of cyberattacks, which required unplanned investments in cybersecurity. With monday.com, they could quickly reprioritize budgets, assess the impact on other priorities, and make informed decisions on the fly.

“The clarity provided by monday.com means we can pivot quickly in response to unexpected challenges,” Tony added.

Attracting the Right Talent

The integration of departments on monday.com also played a role in Howard Kennedy’s ability to attract top talent. Tony explained that hiring specialized roles through lateral hires impacted multiple departments. With monday.com, the firm could centralize communication and collaboration, streamlining the hiring process.

Managing Change

Tony, with over three decades of experience in IT, has seen how people resist change, especially when it threatens their comfort zones. He emphasized the importance of explaining the benefits of new processes and how they contribute to the overall strategy.

“Any technology we introduce must be simple and user-friendly, and that’s where monday.com shines,” Tony said. The platform’s ease of use made it easier for the firm to roll out new processes, ensuring enthusiastic adoption.

The Benefits of Digitizing

According to Tony, law firms have been slower to adopt digital tools for internal operations, despite their widespread use in client services. However, monday.com helped Howard Kennedy overcome this, allowing them to create a cohesive and actionable strategy that connected all aspects of their business.

Legal Workflow Management and Beyond

Looking ahead, Howard Kennedy plans to expand its use of monday.com for legal project management (LPM) and billing processes. By integrating monday.com with their time management software, they aim to automate tasks such as tracking progress against legislative timelines, managing costs, and alerting teams when deadlines are approaching.

“With monday.com, strategy becomes a living, breathing process that everyone contributes to, helping us stay adaptable in a constantly evolving market,” Tony concluded.