Customer Success Story – Wilkin Chapman LLP

COST-EFFECTIVE, FLEXIBLE SKILLS AND COMPLIANCE TRAINING INCREASING EFFICIENCY AND EFFECTIVENESS ACROSS THE WHOLE FIRM

Wilkin Chapman LLP is one of the UK’s top 200 law firms and the largest firm in Lincolnshire and the East Yorkshire regions with approximately 450 partners and staff located across offices in Grimsby, Lincoln, Beverley and Louth. Experts in business and personal law, Wilkin Chapman provides trusted legal and insolvency advice to clients based locally, nationally and internationally.

Business Needs

Four years ago, Wilkin Chapman faced challenges familiar to all SRA registered law firms.  How to meet requirements across the practice to:

1. Deliver and track the completion of essential risk and compliance training;
2. Support the need to maintain continuing competence for lawyers;
3. Provide ALL staff with self-directed learning and development opportunities across a range of workplace and behavioural skills topics;
4. Plan and monitor delivery of the right mix of training for people with different learning needs;
5. Make best use of time to accommodate busy day-to-day workloads;
6. Provide evidence confirming this has been done externally and to satisfy internal management KPI’s.

With increasingly demanding and time-consuming induction requirements, Wilkin Chapman also wanted an online solution to help reduce time needed by the HR team, streamline the process and improve overall efficiency for all involved.

Solution

eAlliance Learning Technology provided a specialist and bespoke online training platform, including an extensive suite of professionally written, SRA approved training courses and materials specifically designed for law firms and a content management system that allows the creation and administration of self-developed learning resources and information updates.

Working alongside multiple stakeholders at Wilkin Chapman, eAlliance developed an online training solution which includes a fully featured, Wilkin Chapman-branded, online learning platform with course libraries and bespoke ‘pathways’ of both comprehensive and shorter “bite-size” refresher courses and activities to meet the exact training needs of each role within the business.

Bespoke, role-related onboarding training programmes, including health and safety and other practice-specific content, were also developed to cover mandatory compliance, operational and cultural training requirements for new starters at the firm – and the first stage of their personal development pathways.

Results

Lisa Draper, the risk and compliance officer at Wilkin Chapman reports that:

“Our staff like the variety of course formats and the range of topics available, including those that are relevant to the legal sector. From an administration point of view, the eAlliance platform is straightforward and simple to use and meets all our requirements in terms of delivering training and compliance”.

Some of the key benefits:

• Implementing eAlliance’s unique solution proved seamless and easy for all;
• Wilkin Chapman immediately rolled out job-role specific training across the whole practice;
• They then created a pre-scheduled online ‘roadmap’ for mandatory training practice-wide;
• The HR and compliance teams can link automated email reminders to all their training activities;
• These management teams now have total visibility of course completions, enabling them to ensure that the firm remains compliant and risk averse, whilst evidencing achievement of training required for accreditation purposes;
• The compliance team have created a library of self-generated content, including regular regulatory updates and legal sector information, which is easily added to the training plans of employees when required;
• The eAlliance online solution enabled continued essential training during the COVID pandemic and provides consistency and flexibility for hybrid workers and those requiring remote access to compliance training;
• Data from Wilkin Chapman’s learning and development platform shows that there has been a 23% improvement in all course completions across the practice over the past 12-month period;
• By moving the majority of its induction programme onto the eAlliance platform, the HR team has seen significant improvements in time saving on co-ordination and delivery of induction, whilst benefitting their own productivity and efficiency.

To find out more about eAlliance can help your firm to implement cost effective, customised skills and compliance training contact us:

Email: enquiries@ea-learningtech.com