Knights – Digitisation & Storage

Project Background

Knights is the UK’s fastest growing regional legal services business. With offices throughout the regions the business provides collaborative legal teams across the UK. The company has a £160m turnover, which they are aiming to double, and over 26 offices. Knights operates a distinctive and proven business model that supports robust and sustainable growth, enabling them to expand both organically and through strategic acquisitions.

To achieve key business objectives, Cleardata identified with Knights that they required modern working methods, such as AI, to allow them to leverage data and technology to scale operations effectively. An agile approach to working was also essential, enabling colleagues to work from any location utilising the Microsoft suite of products.

Reasons for digitisation

• Support modern ways of working
• Practical solution for increasing volume of files
• Reduce long term storage costs

Upon acquisition, Knights intake large volumes of case files and cabinets which often take up significant amounts of prime office space. They had created their own team to deal with the increasing volume of incoming files, however found that the true cost to be higher than they had originally anticipated to support this task.

With a target to enable modern ways of working and a paper-lite approach, Knights opted to digitise their legal case files. All files would require data indexing allowing information to be easily found when needed and to maintain compliance with regulations. Knights had been through a process of reviewing records to be kept, prior to working with us, and had put them into third party storage. This involved several suppliers generating multiple invoices meaning costs were challenging to monitor.

How did Cleardata help?

Our team works with Knights following an acquisition to provide a bespoke digitisation approach to meet the needs of their business. To date 5,500 boxes have been collected, across 13 digitisation projects. If documents are needed at any time prior to scanning, retrieval is provided via our accessible scan on demand services.

We provide a cost-effective approach to scanning over an agreed period, to ensure affordability and work in line with budget requirements.  Our National Accounts Director, Jess Meikle provided management information for Knights to allow them to complete a cost benefit analysis and business case to outsource.

Key Tasks Undertaken

• Consultative approach to paperwork challenges.
• Boxed up files onsite.
• Documents collected using tracked fleet.
• Records checked in and indexed with secure audit trail.
• File scanning scheduled over three years.
• Compliant, secure document storage and scanning facility.
• Scan on demand file retrieval service.
• Documents intelligently prepped for scanning.
• Files scanned using latest Kodak & IBML technology to BS 10008 for legal admissibility
• 2 x 100% quality checking process
• Files digitally uploaded to client.

Client Feedback

How we’ve found working with Cleardata

We spoke with Colin Jones, Group IT Director at Knights to ask him about his experience with Cleardata.

“Once we met Cleardata and explained our documentation problems, we found they worked closely with us and gave helpful advice on how to tackle the project. Cleardata were open about affordable, cost effective and added value solutions.

They provided useful information based on our volumes which allowed us to deliver a business case. We calculated that the cost of scanning was less than it was costing our business to have our own admin team scanning/processing incoming legal documents.

It would also reduce our ongoing long-term storage costs by around 15% as we continued to grow. The new digitisation business model was much more efficient for Knights and aligned seamlessly with our strategic needs.

Cleardata’s quality, responsiveness and service levels have met all our business needs.  The difference in completing scanning internally versus outsourcing is that they’re completely focused on the task, whereas our resources can get assigned onto other priority business tasks, which means that the scanning ultimately takes longer to complete and costs more. In addition, outsourcing has meant reduced pressure on our business for requests for additional equipment, licensing fees and staff resources during peak times.

The digitisation strategy deals with the practical issue of lots of new paperwork, which due to the nature of acquisition, is stored and indexed in many different ways.  We’ve found a better way of working which fits in with our agile strategy and supports our records management goals.

Our legal records are being scanned quickly, to exceptional quality. So far, Cleardata have scanned around 150,000 files with no quality issues. The high quality of scanning has resulted in zero readable issues, such as folded corners, double feeds or blurred images, with no complaints from fee earners, which is a credit to the quality assurance processes and high standards which Cleardata applies internally. Our legal fee earners are really impressed!

High quality records are also important for potential future use of ai technology. Cleardata uses the latest IBML and Kodak scanning technology which also eliminates common quality issues.

Experience and accreditations were important to us, due to the nature of our business and Cleardata met all our requirements, giving us confidence as a business to choose them as our digitisation partner. Records are scanned in line with BS 10008 for legal admissibility, the company is assured to ISO27001:2022, the latest information security standard and Cyber Essentials Plus.

Cleardata’s team indexes our records for us on arrival, providing fast search and digital file retrieval.  Their cloud based Cleardox based Archive Management System allows us to see a full audit trail of any activity and helps us to manage ongoing retention efficiently.

I would recommend Cleardata’s services to other companies as their partnership approach has really supported our business model and has provided a solution to a significant business challenge. Their National Accounts Manager Jess has supported us every step of the way and we value them as a true partner. ”

Colin Jones, Group IT Director Knights