Case Study : Roxburgh Milkins

Introduction

WonderWord recently had the pleasure of working with Roxburgh Milkins Limited. Based in Bristol, Roxburgh Milkins are a specialist law firm that provides excellent service in their key areas of expertise, Corporate and Commercial Law.

Roxburgh Milkins relies heavily on Microsoft Word in their daily operations. As a team of commercial lawyers, they find this software to be a vital tool for their work. A large portion of their day-to-day activities revolve around negotiating commercial contracts, and Word serves as the primary platform for producing these crucial documents.

The Problem

The time that Roxburgh Milkins lawyers spent addressing formatting issues in Microsoft Word documents varied significantly from day to day. But when they did encounter challenges, the firm’s professionals would be spending time trying to address pasting, formatting and numbering issues.

This was becoming a problem for the team, taking valuable time away from fee earning and adding unnecessary stress to the lawyers’ day.

The Approach

Roxburgh Milkins needed urgent help with the format of their documents, and WonderWord were recommended to Roxburgh Milkins by Alex Hutchinson of Hutchinson & Company, a third-party IT specialist who works exclusively in the legal sector.

Immediately, WonderWord founder Leanne Bentley established that they did not have a consistently used house style. It is important that any law firm has a house style as it ensures that any work product that goes out to clients and competitors reflects the branding, professionalism and cohesion of the firm. Not only this, but they were also working with no working template and no standard formatting, with the quality of their work product negatively affected as a result.

Leanne undertook a comprehensive review of their template documents. This allowed her to identify common elements and preferences in document presentation across the firm. She was then able to create basic templates in a uniform house style that encapsulated the firm's desired aesthetic and structural elements. These new templates incorporated key formatting aspects, including:

• A standardised numbering system for sections and subsections

• A uniform font choice that aligned with the firm's brand

• Bespoke design of heading styles and numbering for sector-specific documents

• Consistency of format and structure of numbering to ensure ease of use

Leanne was also able to create additional sector-specific legal documents for Roxburgh Milkins. Once the templates had been agreed upon by all parties, Leanne then reformatted a handful of their most used documents to the new format which have already been successfully implemented.

They were then uploaded to the firm’s system by Alex Hutchinson. This truly reflects the collaboration on this project.

Leanne says:

“Roxburgh Milkins were a fantastic client to work with because they were already familiar with the benefits of using Styles and knew what they wanted to achieve from the project.”

The Result

Roxburgh Milkins have been spending some time familiarising themselves with the templates before undertaking WonderWord’s bespoke training module. In addition to this, Leanne will also be completing a reformatting exercise of all of their current precedent documents.

We are really pleased to hear that this project has positively changed the way that Roxburgh Milkins uses Microsoft Word. Once the training and final improvements have been made, we hope that the results will be even more successful.

We asked Charles van der Lande, Director at Roxburgh Milkins Limited, what he thought of his experience with WonderWord Training. Here’s what he had to say:

“Leanne approaches things in a very common-sense and practical way. She efficiently completed the project that we needed her for. She knows her way around Word like the back of her hand and has lots of experience with legal firms. Leanne was able to offer plenty of advice and insights which were super helpful for the team. She has also helped us on an ad-hoc basis as we have had formatting issues with particular documents. Again, Leanne was able to sort these out very efficiently. Would I recommend WonderWord to other law firms? Absolutely!”

Get in touch to find out how we can undertake a house style project for you, that is bespoke to your firm and to your documents