Barhead Solutions streamlines admin work for Marrickville Legal Centre with Microsoft-based Consensus platform

Barhead Solutions has scored a contract with not-for-profit community legal services provider Marrickville Legal Centre to deploy its Microsoft-based Consensus platform.

Consensus is Barhead’s end-to-end contract and matter management platform built on the Microsoft Cloud, using automated workflows, advanced search, email management and more help to reduce the workload of legal, procurement, contracting and risk and compliance teams.

Marrickville Legal Centre (MLC) provides free legal advice or affordable representation to members of the community that would otherwise be unable to access assistance and serves a large number of clients.

The organisation already works within the Microsoft stack, making the Consensus platform suitable for its needs.

“As a large community legal centre, you can imagine the volume of clients we have coming in,” MLC managing principal solicitor Vasili Maroulis said.

“There's a huge amount of administrative work that's associated with that. As part of our insurance requirements, we need to comply with the Risk Management Guide, which requires employees and supervising solicitors to review and follow very specific processes for all of our legal work, especially in the case of volunteers.”

“Considering we're already working within the Microsoft stack, it makes perfect sense to work with a Microsoft Gold Partner like Barhead.”

Maroulis said Consensus’ email integration and ability to dual sync from the app to SharePoint was going to be “incredibly helpful” for client file management.

He added that adopting Consensus is predicted to deliver between a 20 to 30 percent administrative efficiency for paid staff and employed lawyers across MLC.

“What that will then translate to is freeing up that time to enable solicitors and employees to deliver more frontline services to the community,” he said.

Maroulis said Barhead thought outside the box in relation to approaching solutions within MLC. “That's critical for us with the breadth of everyday operational requirements and the number of projects we have. They've been pivotal in mapping out where we can be and the improvements that we can make,” he said.