Six hours of manual busywork a week. Automated in a one-week project.
A boutique law firm was hand-collecting intellectual property data from two government registries. Now it arrives on its own, clean, every time. (Name withheld at the firm's request.)
Nobody's favourite job, every single week.
Part of this firm's work depends on current intellectual property data from two government registries: IP Australia and its New Zealand counterpart, IPONZ.
Getting it was nobody's favourite job. Every week, a staff member logged into each website, ran the searches, filtered the results, downloaded the files, then cleaned and tabled the data by hand so the rest of the team could use it.
That added up to about six hours of skilled staff time a week, at $120 an hour. It was repetitive, easy to get wrong, and the whole process lived in one person's head: every time someone left, the firm had to train it into somebody new.
The whole run, with no human in the loop.
We built an automation that does the entire job itself:
- It collects the right records itself, talking directly to the registries through their official interfaces rather than clicking through websites
- It cleans and conditions the data automatically, applying the firm's rules so results come out consistent every time
- It delivers everything into dedicated SharePoint lists, where staff manage the matters directly from the list itself: no downloads, no copy-paste, no re-tabling
- Delivered as a one-week project, including testing and staff training
The data just arrives. The hours went somewhere better.
- About six hours of staff time back every week. At the firm's $120-an-hour staffing rate, that's roughly $720 a week, about $37,000 a year
- Errors essentially eliminated. The automation runs the same way every time: no mistyped filters, no missed rows, no copy-paste slips
- Minimal manual handling. Staff work from the lists; the collection and cleaning just happens
- Staff turnover no longer hurts. The process lives in the automation, not in one person's head, so there's far less to train when people change
- The hours went somewhere better. Time spent downloading and re-tabling data now goes into work that's actually valuable to clients
It's the same busywork problem we see across law firms of every size: skilled people doing repetitive collection work a machine should be doing.
What's your six hours?
Most businesses have a job like this: manual, repetitive, done every week by someone skilled enough to be doing something better. Those few hours were costing this firm about $37,000 a year. The fix took one week.