Tax Law Firm Lowers Mismanagement Risks by Adopting Wrike
RPBA — international tax law boutique based in Portugal, provides niche legal services with a focus on income and real estate taxes. Praised by the Chambers Europe 2013 directory that ranks the best law firms and lawyers.
Their story
Legal projects were growing too complex to manage using basic spreadsheets and email.
Legal procedures are project-driven and full of dependent steps, each having a deadline. While some deadlines are negotiable and can be rescheduled (such as a team's internal meetings), others are immovable (such as court hearings). Add the complexity of juggling multiple projects with clients spread across different locations and jurisdictions and you have some sense of the challenge facing RPBA. Moreover, because every legal procedure contains many tiny yet crucial details, RPBA needed a robust and organized system for storing and processing project information. They needed a way to minimize the high risk of mismanagement — something that was totally incompatible with the company's high standards of service. "With such a setting, it was hard to remember different deadlines, manage complex projects, and collaborate efficiently," says Ricardo da Palma Borges, managing partner at RPBA. "Now that we use Wrike, relying only on Outlook and Excel was like the stone age of our project management."
"Wrike changed our daily work by providing us with tools for effective project control and risk reduction. This boosts confidence in our performance and diminishes concerns of failure."
Their victory
Wrike has become the perfect tool for managing the legal processes of RPBA's 9 dedicated lawyers.
The entire RPBA team found a unique way to deal with all the complex deadlines by using custom templates to organize client projects and provide a project timeline. Using Wrike, collaborating on legal docs is at a whole new level with sharing tasks and documents all in one platform. Wrike allows the RPBA team to keep track of their strict deadlines while providing flexibility when project schedules change. "We found a project management app that could become a flexible, reliable, yet easy-to-use system for keeping track of our workflows, deadlines, and project documents," says da Palma Borges, who now easily aligns all project steps and instantly adjusts the schedule when necessary.
Their superpowers
Task sharing
Team members found it really convenient to share, edit, discuss and store legal docs alongside project plans — all in one system. When adding notes or comments, a team member now simply @mentions the corresponding person and they get notified about the comment immediately. This cuts time spent searching through emails and tracking down colleagues for updates.
Custom templates
When they start a new project, team members create a recurring task with two occurrences: the first occurrence indicates a strict deadline, which is turned into a milestone that isn't affected by rescheduling other tasks on the timeline. The second occurrence is a simple task with a prior due date that is used to adjust the project schedule internally and achieve interim goals.
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