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Webber Wentzel Bowens (WWB)
Overview
Webber Wentzel Bowens (WWB) is one of the largest and oldest law firms in South Africa with a significant international practice. The firm is committed to transformation. It has a staff of almost 400 people (some 75 are partners) in a variety of legal disciplines. Local offices are situated in Johannesburg and Cape Town.
Challenge
WWB had been managing its business and servicing its clients through a combination of manual methods and numerous paper forms that were passed through multiple departments and across two offices. The firm wanted to implement both a document management system and a business process management (BPM) system to provide a more productive, streamlined and efficient work environment. A few of the firm’s compliance processes had become unwieldy and the lack of automation created areas of inefficiency. There was also an increasing need for uniformity across the firm and with it, a need for predictable quality control.
The decision to move forward was ultimately fast tracked with the onset of the Financial Intelligence Center Act (FICA) in South Africa. WWB needed to meet demands brought on by FICA – new legislation to combat money laundering, affecting all attorneys along with banks and a wide range of other businesses handling money on behalf of their clients. This legislation requires WWB to carry out due diligence to establish and verify its client's identity and to consider the particular activity when handling clients' requests. The process requires the coordination of a large number of people in the firm handling a wide variety of clients, each of whom have unique information supported by a variety of different documents sourced from numerous countries around the world.
The procedures required for the firm's clients to be compliant with FICA are critical, complex, and vital to the firm’s success. With WWB’s old manual methods, there was no automated way to track status and history or to maintain a full audit trail.
Solution
To help meet compliance requirements, the firm turned to BPM software from Metastorm and today, WWB has set a standard in South Africa as the first legal firm to properly adopt BPM for FICA compliance.
WWB is using Metastorm’s BPM solution as a compliance backbone to respond to regulations brought on by FICA. Metastorm BPM has enabled the firm to effectively manage the regulatory aspects of new client business – for both new and existing clients – which is now a compulsory process under these new regulations. The firm currently has approximately 15,000-25,000 active matters in Metastorm BPM at any given point in time.
Metastorm BPM allows forms and information to be submitted, analyzed and transferred to secure databases where it can be retrieved as necessary for reporting, audit checks, or general monitoring.
The firm has also integrated Metastorm BPM with its practice management system from Thomson Elite. This collaboration automatically enforces compliance with legislation and yet it also allows work to commence on the client's matter after a conflict check is complete and the FICA validation process is work in progress or has been completed.
Results
The automation of its FICA process using Metastorm BPM has enabled the firm to meet compliance requirements, realize greater efficiency, increase productivity and improve quality control by enabling anyone involved in the process to have complete visibility of work in progress. The new automated process provides an audit trail that helps the firm document the due diligence that takes place before signing a new client or taking on a new matter for an existing client.
Metastorm BPM has been able to decrease the time it takes to perform WWB’s FICA procedures since all processes are controlled and all data is saved, archived, searchable, and indexed. The use of Metastorm has also resulted in improved client service with the ability to quickly respond to clients and give them status information in real-time.
WWB is also looking to expand its use of Metastorm by implementing additional processes including a full integration with its Interwoven document management system and extending the value of Metastorm BPM with wireless connectivity, making further use of the firm’s Blackberry enterprise solution with their handheld devices.
“We looked at other applications and there wasn’t anything that could match Metastorm BPM and so far it has achieved our objectives 100%,” stated Eugene van Vuren, IT manager at Webber Wentzel Bowens. “The ability to comprehensively comply with legislation and to handle our clients' needs whilst also being completely transparent is a significant competitive advantage, and Metastorm's BPM solution has enabled us to do just that.”
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