Kingsley Napley Turns Edisclosure into a Competitive Advantage Through Everlaw
With recent market-moving announcements of generative AI tools and corpus-wide search capabilities, it might be easy to forget that the days of physical copies and banker's boxes weren’t so long ago.
Barristers and paralegals would pore over stacks of documents, armed with highlighters and sticky notes, painstakingly reading through each word to ensure nothing was missed. While this was an efficient way of working for the time, it wasn’t a sustainable way to process thousands—and sometimes millions—of documents.
Although much of the talk around the legal profession today is centred around flashy new technologies and innovative, cutting-edge features, that same attention to detail, openness to learning, and work ethic are still integral to the identity of every legal professional.
Staying at the forefront is how Kingsley Napley has become a recognised leading international law firm for over 80 years, known for its work in criminal litigation, regulatory law, and a wide range of private client and commercial services. The firm has built a strong reputation for handling complex, high-profile cases, earning top rankings in legal directories such as Chambers and Partners and The Legal 500.
As the Data & Discovery Manager at the firm, Tom Ingram has been present for much of the transformation around the disclosure process, and has been instrumental in helping barristers see the benefits of technology in their practice. His role revolves around overseeing the preservation, collection, processing, review, and production of ESI, and taking the pulse of how competitors are implementing technology in an effort to remain ahead of the curve.
The Nascent Days of Edisclosure
A clear throughline in Tom’s career is the push to get barristers to use the technological tools at their disposal.
“When I got started, people were still printing emails, going through everything page by page,” Tom said. “It would take months to do quite mundane tasks. A lot of lawyers were from the old school. Some of them would even ask their secretaries to manage their emails because they didn't want to use the computer. They held all this knowledge, but they didn't want to touch the computer.”
The challenge for Tom, both then and now, was in helping barristers see how technology can help supplement their work and make them better practitioners. He sees technology as a partner, one which can help the entire firm provide better services to clients and do their jobs more effectively.
Visualising the Process
Tom first found Everlaw after joining a different firm that was already using it, and immediately set to work getting familiar with the platform. He noticed the difference between its capabilities and those of the legacy platforms he’d used throughout his career almost immediately.
“I believe it was 2020 when I first came across Everlaw,” Tom said. “And there was this huge jump. It almost immediately started making a significant difference in my work.”
Tom found that, thanks to Everlaw’s intuitive interface and helpful features, he didn’t experience any reticence in getting barristers to adopt new tools and technology. When he moved to Kingsley Napley, which had also recently adopted Everlaw, he started getting barristers trained and comfortable with the platform.
“The biggest win for me is the fact that the lawyers love it because it's so visual,” Tom said. “It's really intuitive to use, and they don’t need a ton of training.”
It’s not just the visual nature of Everlaw that makes it so easy to use, but the features are also similarly user-friendly.
“In Everlaw you can actually see what you’re doing,” Tom said. “When you create searches, they build as you create them. You can see how many documents you have and how they’re organised so you don’t waste time looking for anything. The lawyers love that they can just click on various bits of the visualisation and go, ‘This email and this email, these people and these people,’ and it builds it straight away. You can do it on your mouse and it's just brilliant.”
Empowering Barristers Through Support
Another bright spot in Tom’s use of Everlaw is the customer support assistance he and all of Kingsley Napley receive free of charge, whenever they need it. This helps create not just happy lawyers, but confident and informed ones as well, because they know they’ll be able to get their questions answered without delaying their work.
"Everlaw has the best support team I've ever used in any business, not just in edisclosure,” Tom said. “Whenever I call them, they sort out my issues immediately, even for more technical problems. It’s so refreshing to get answers to my questions almost instantly. I’ve never had as good of customer service as I get with Everlaw."
Part of Tom’s mission is to supply barristers with the tools they need to do their jobs effectively, and Everlaw has been a major part of that. And often, that means getting out of the way so they can do it themselves.
“The lawyers want to be able to do the tech part of things on their own because there’s typically always a rush,” Tom said. “They're working on multiple cases. So I try to let them run it because I think that’s how it should be. I tell them, ‘We've got the software. We’ll set it up for you, put the documents in, set up the batches, and off you go with your review. If you want to do additional searches, this is how you do it. You run with it.’ And I think that works for most of the lawyers, especially in a platform that’s as easy to use as Everlaw.”
Tom’s expertise and experience, partnered with Everlaw’s practical features and intuitive user interface, allow Kingsley Napley’s barristers to find the information they need when they need it so they can move on with their case.
Making a Difference
Continuing to grow and innovate as a leading law firm means more than just adopting technology into your practice. You also have to leverage it in a way that makes a difference in the lives of your barristers and clients.
Tom has perfected this over the course of his career, and now, with Everlaw, has found a platform that barristers not only want to use, but actively incorporate it into their work even without his prodding.
“You look for the technology to make your life easier,” Tom said. “And with Everlaw, we actually have that.”
