HighQ: A powerful platform for project management and innovation

A leading European law firm, Noerr advises on all aspects of corporate and business law. Headquartered in Germany, it has some 500 advisors across offices in eight countries. Its outlook is tech forward — in addition to advising clients on digital transformation, it seeks to digitise its own projects and processes. Central to this effort is Thomson Reuters HighQ.

HighQ is the modern, adaptable legal operations and business management software solution that simplifies legal processes which Noerr deploys as a platform for project management and as the cornerstone of its unique tech offering. Having started by developing a litigation use case — the firm created a mass litigation platform that has since been shortlisted for an award by The Lawyer — Noerr is now exploring the many other possibilities HighQ offers.

The firm had developed its own unique tech tools in the past, created its own data lake, and was an early adopter of document automation. In 2022, it identified a pressing need for a litigation platform to coordinate and streamline all its mass litigation work. Rather than build something from scratch, the firm opted to implement HighQ as the solution.

The practical and strategic option

There were two key reasons for this decision; one was practicality. Whereas previous projects took a lot of time and effort, the firm had the potential to implement HighQ in a short timeframe, and within five months, the mass claims platform was up and running. The second reason was strategic: HighQ offered scope to be used across the firm more widely in various ways, acting as the basis for many different use cases and avoiding the need to run multiple software products.

“We chose HighQ primarily because we did not need to develop it ourselves. With HighQ we have a user interface; we have a tool stack with tasks, a calendar, and a data room that we can use and build upon,” explains Henner Schläfke, Head of Noerr’s Class Action and Mass Claim Defence practice. “Another major argument was that it’s not a litigation-only platform, but a firm-wide platform that could be used for all types of internal and external project management, from M&A transactions to compliance reviews, to IP, and more.”

Another major plus point of HighQ is its ability to connect seamlessly with other third-party and proprietary tech tools. This integration means it can draw information from Noerr’s data lake; integrate with add-ons, such as DocuSign and Microsoft’s Power BI data visualization software; and connect with a “robot” the firm developed in cooperation with a software provider to turbocharge process automation. As a result, HighQ forms the main element of what is known as “Noerr Together,” a bespoke platform the firm offers as a service to clients, allowing them to collaborate on — and have greater visibility over — their matters.

A seamless solution for litigation

Noerr is one of the foremost law firms in Germany that provides litigation work. With such a heavy workload and high client expectations, it needed a way to work smarter and increase efficiency by reducing the manual processes involved by automating workflows and document creation, streamlining data analysis, and improving transparency. It decided to use HighQ to create a central litigation management platform.

Whereas many firms choose to start simply with digital transformation projects and then build up, this initial use case was a complex undertaking. The small-scale pilot consisted of more than 1,000 parallel litigation proceedings the firm needed to manage and processes to automate. The success of this test case provided confidence to roll the solution out more widely to create a full-scale mass claims platform, and Noerr now manages all its mass claims and litigation matters in HighQ within Noerr Together.

The firm can set up new client sites in just one day. Edina Julevic, Legal Solutions Engineer in Noerr’s Legal Tech team and product owner of Noerr Together, says, “We embrace digital transformation, not as an end, but as a journey towards continuous innovation and growth.”

HighQ provides a stable interface; excellent rights management; and a robust, read-only function so clients can access their own dashboards 24/7. This ability allows them to easily see the status of their cases, view files securely, and search for the information they need. Noerr uses almost all the available modules in HighQ for client and team collaboration, document management, workflow and task management, and data visualisation — plus Document Automation to create documents automatically at the click of a button.

Schläfke says: “HighQ allows us to very efficiently manage our cases and give the client a perfect overview from day one. Clients are happy that we can provide them with an easy-to-access data room, a clear structure for court files — which are always up to date — and key statistics of their litigation at their fingertips without the need to ask for updates. Internally, HighQ and Noerr Together are even more powerful because they allow us to automate most simple filings, and we have even created quite complex submissions using Document Automation.”

Julevic adds, “Automating documents has significantly reduced the time and effort required for handling paperwork, enabling faster turnaround times and allowing colleagues to focus on higher-value tasks.”

Spreading digitalisation

To date, there are 500 active HighQ users within the firm, plus it has also granted access to clients. It has autogenerated around 4,000 documents and saved 200,000 pages of files in the system.

All users — lawyers, assistants, and clients — have now widely embraced the HighQ platform. These users, including clients, are giving feedback and coming up with new questions and suggestions about digitising more processes. Several other practice groups, including the M&A, trademarks, and arbitration teams, are starting to use HighQ for their projects as the benefits become apparent. It has become the go-to solution for optimising project and matter management.

Schläfke says: “We found a solution that works in all major use cases and is ready for more. We use HighQ as one single platform across the whole firm — there’s only one onboarding and we do not need to explain the platform once people start working on a new project.

“HighQ allows us to resort to the same tools at its core and build platforms that fit needs without building something that is single use. To some extent, it forces us to standardise, and we want to standardise repetitive tasks and workflows because standardisation allows for more efficiency.”

Altogether, the three-strong legal tech team is already managing more than 70 different projects in HighQ, and they have ambitions to do far more. For example, Julevic outlines plans to implant a new large-scale use case for an IP project, develop an automated fee-calculation system to streamline the quotation process and ensure accuracy, and develop interfaces to facilitate seamless communication with government departments. Clearly, the sky’s the limit with HighQ.