Law Firm
Watson Farley & Williams
The Vable platform transforms the way information teams work.
Respond to increased demand
With automated content aggregation, the team can respond positively to increased demands for regular, curated news updates covering clients, sectors, and horizon scanning.
Transform the way you work
Vable assisted the team in eliminating points of frustration around current awareness delivery. They can deliver curated, relevant updates, all customised to people’s needs.
Unleash your creativity
The professional, fresh design has elevated the team’s output. The Vable platform is well-designed and fun to use and the entire firm has responded enthusiastically to the platform.
Responding to Increased Demand for Customised Alerts
WFW is a growing firm with over 500 lawyers and 15 offices worldwide. The Information and Research team was seeing an increased demand for regular, curated news updates covering clients, sectors, and horizon scanning. These ranged from broad market updates for groups to highly customized alerts for individual lawyers.
Even prior to the logistical and information demands of COVID-19, the I&R team explained, they had
We had reached capacity and were having to push back on requests, limiting the scope. Lateral hires from firms that had similar products in place arrived with expectations that we could deliver the same level of monitoring and alerting. We needed a technical solution and a more innovative approach, so we decided to take time to reassess and reimagine what we could offer, rather than just migrate our current portfolio of tracks as it was.
Points of frustration caused by traditional current awareness delivery
- Time-consuming: Maintaining, administering, and coordinating numerous requests was heavy work
- Individual specialization: Each team member had a portfolio of tracks and they quickly became topic experts, but providing annual leave cover could be a challenge
- Inflexible: The manual process meant limits on frequency, timing, sources covered, and customization requests
- Inconsistent branding: Old fashioned, inconsistent output, with a mix of styles, links, and text
Vable has “transformed the way we work”
Vable assisted WFW's I&R team in eliminating these points of frustration. Their new professional-looking newsletters are delivering targeted, valuable and timely headlines, from all relevant free and premium sources. As the team explained,
After the initial training, it’s tempting to jump straight in and start building newsletters, however, it’s important to understand how Vable is structured, and how the searches can be layered to build topics and then newsletters. We dedicated a lot of time to experimenting and re-evaluating what we were distributing. The platform offers a lot of options so the process works better if you adopt a more open-minded approach.
Vable enables collaboration across the entire team because everyone can add, amend and share all the information and alerts - all in one place. Testing and experimenting helped build up the team’s confidence, allowing them to become more creative and agile.
The Vable platform is well-designed and fun to use
The clean, modern look of the email alerts is very popular, they look really good. Engagement with everyone in the business has been the most positive experience since rolling out Vable, which reflects well on the team. As they said, “we opted for a soft launch but as word got out, we started receiving regular requests and now have a pipeline of new exciting topics in development.”
We can respond faster and deliver more, highly curated, relevant updates, customized to people’s needs. The professional, fresh design has elevated our team’s output. The fact that people are enthusiastic and engaged means we are finding this a re-energized, positive, collaborative exercise.
The Vable platform is well-designed and fun to use, the team also reports that Vable customer support is very responsive and nice to work with. They explained, “it feels personal so you can always double-check something or get and give clarification if discussing something complex.”
We decided on Vable because it is incredibly flexible, the end result looks effortlessly professional, and most importantly the team really enjoyed working with it. We also really liked the friendly, knowledgeable, and creative team at Vable.
WFW's future plans for Vable
Their plans for the future fall into two parts.
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Interactivity: They want to take a different approach to media monitoring by encouraging a more interactive process with the lawyers and other parts of the business. This will allow them to push out more relevant content, and promote premium sources. They are interested to see how MyVable (Vable’s end user portal) might work for self-service via the intranet.
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Analytics: They see the potential with Vable’s reporting and tracking functionality. They haven’t previously had the ability to gather statistics and report on email delivery, click-throughs, and subscribers.
Vable has transformed the way they work, and they have been able to rapidly expand and enhance their firm’s current awareness capability. It has freed up time, enabling them to concentrate on content and add value with bespoke curation, rather than spending hours compiling and formatting. The firm has responded enthusiastically to Vable, and it has led to the I&R team being even more collaborative and creative.
Find out how Vable helps all kinds of professional service firms and companies to manage their information needs.
