In-house Innovations

Here at SAS Daniels LLP we embraced the Web 2.0 generation with the launch of ‘i-Room’, our very own “Wiki”, back in February 2008. – To the best of our knowledge we were the first law firm in the North West to adopt this technology. We’re as committed to getting the best out of technology as we are to getting the best out of our people and doing the best for our clients..

As a multi-site Firm, we needed to find a way to help us encourage interaction between staff at various offices, to help us avoid our drowning in a sea of emails and to provide us with a more dynamic way of capturing and developing the firm’s knowledge. Lees rigid, more interactive, and more fun than an intranet, i-Room provides an easy ‘point of ready reference’ for staff to access information about company policies and procedures, as well as enable them to identify expertise elsewhere in the organisation and collaborate more closely with colleagues in other offices.

By adapting Wiki technology, we felt that we could create a site that would allow employees to add content to the site, comment on others entries made by peers, add photos and text and even weblinks – all of which would aid integration and our internal communications.

The ‘i-Room’ – named by our employees – hosts knowledge, corporate and social calendars and discussion forums about work issues, and helped us move away from the ‘All Staff’ e-mails that many companies send daily. It is now the homepage that every employee sees when they open their web browser each morning. By clicking on the ‘News’ section of i-Room, staff can access up-to-date information about the Firm, its people, performance, events and so on that we used to send and receive by e-mail. Any member of staff can add their own news, upload precedents, find out more about our clients, contribute a Bright Idea or Ask the Boss!

The ‘People’ section works like a Firm-wide Facebook, where each member of staff keeps a personal profile that their colleagues can read to find out more about their professional and personal lives, and being able to put faces and names to new colleagues makes a big difference in helping recruits to settle.

The i-Room is a work in progress. There is still masses of potential there but as for now, the i-Room has enabled us to encourage social interaction and collaborative working between employees across 5 offices, 9 departments and 140 employees.