interview: Clare Chachere, COO at Slack Davis Sanger

This is the first in a series of interviews we are doing with experts in the legal field. Not just attorneys, but also key staff, experts and more.

Clare Chachere is the Chief Operating Officer at Slack Davis Sanger (SDS), a personal injury firm with a focus on aviation and catastrophic injury cases. The firm has offices in Austin, Dallas and Fort Worth and has been a long-time client of the Clear Guidance team.

Clare came to SDS from a Big 4 accounting/consulting firm, so her expectations were very high on how well technology can help a business succeed. Accordingly, SDS worked with the Clear Guidance team to institute several major changes at the firm.

When everyone went to work from home the last few months, how well prepared was the firm?

What helped us prepare to work from home was two-fold. First, the Austin office had a “test run” of everyone working from home last September when we were between office spaces due to construction delays on the new office. Based on that experience, we knew what we really needed versus what we did to get by and/or thought we needed. We also prepared “go bags” of office supplies for each person to take home, so they had some basics. We had upgraded all firm-issued computers just a few months prior and switched over to laptops for the paralegals. This made it far easier for them to work remote than having to haul a desktop to/from the office. We also keep multiple “loaner” laptops that we were able to give to the staff who were still using desktops and were also going to be working remote.

What are some of the biggest technology improvements the firm has made?

At my previous job the firm could deploy a new laptop for a user very quickly. CGP instituted a similar model by creating a “standard image” that allows a computer to be fully setup and deployed for a person in less than a day. We can quickly initiate the image by clicking a few buttons, so there is no need to wait for CGP to make a trip to the office. It’s actually an even faster process than what was done at my previous 180k+ person international firm.

How has the firm’s communication technology improved?

CGP’s team brought on RingCentral as an option to replace our legacy on-premise VOIP phone system. Switching to the new cloud-based VOIP with many feature enhancements allowed us to  cut out sizeable telecom bills and maintenance fees. The change ended up saving the firm over $40k/year alone. And, trust me when I say that the Partners don’t forget that kind of savings year-to-year! Another benefit of switching over to RingCentral, beyond the functionality allowing us to work remote seamlessly, is that CGP is able to provide support for our phones as well. They understand how law firms work, so we rarely have to call RingCentral or anyone else for support.

We are in the middle of a practice management deployment. What is your biggest takeaway from the project so far?

Let’s start off by saying that switching practice management systems is no fun for anyone. But, the best idea we had was selecting a super-organized paralegal to drive the project. She loves this kind of thing and has worked with the rest of the staff to customize the system to meet the firm’s unique needs. She reached out to all the “power users” to get feedback and insight. And, during that process found that part of the old system had really just become a dumping ground for documents people thought just needed to be saved somewhere. Once we discovered that, were able to delete a lot of data out of our old system instead of just migrating everything. Cleaning up the current system for the data migration is really critical to ensure that you don’t end up with extra “noise” in your brand new system. As a paralegal, she works in the system on a daily basis, so getting it right from the start for the people that were going to be using it the most was really important. She has been able to dig in and get it done more efficiently and effectively than I would’ve been able to.  Finding “that person” at the firm to handle the project is a huge component of how smoothly development and implementation are going to go.