It’s official, Nottinghamshire County Council’s Legal Services Team is the best in the country!

They scooped the accolade at the prestigious Municipal Journal (MJ) Achievement Awards in London, seeing off fellow finalists Brighton and Hove Council, Liverpool City Council, London Borough of Lambeth, Newark and Sherwood District Council and Peterborough City Council to win Legal Services Team of the Year.

The MJ Awards – local government’s equivalent to the Oscars – celebrates the UK’s best Council services.

Nottinghamshire County Council’s Legal Services team was nominated for the way in which it has embraced new technology and new ways of working to revolutionise the way it operates and nearly half its running costs.

This has helped the team to bring its complex child protection work, which helps vulnerable children in Nottinghamshire, back in-house. The switch from using external law firms for this work looks likely to continue saving the Council and local taxpayers around £850,000 every year.

Significant changes to the way Legal Services operates has seen the team switch from a mainly paper-based system to integrated, digital solutions for managing documents, filing and communication – reducing the Council’s expenditure on Legal Services by 46% in the last two years.

Working with the Nottinghamshire Family Courts Service, the Council’s Legal team has pioneered the introduction of electronic Court Bundles for use by Judges and Magistrates.

The new electronic service for preparing court documents went live in January and means that all new cases conducted within the magistrate’s court are now communicated and conducted electronically, replacing the previous system where paper bundles of documents for court cases of up to 15,000 pages were put together by hand.

The switch to the electronic system is a first for Family Courts in this country and has attracted considerable national interest.

Councillor Alan Rhodes, Leader of Nottinghamshire County Council hailed the success of the team as an example of how the Council was doing things differently to make savings, whilst maintaining and improving services.

He said: “I am absolutely delighted for everyone in our Legal Services Team at this thoroughly deserved accolade. They are the perfect example of how the Council is modernising and transforming the way it operates to provide, better, more efficient and more effective services.

“Making such big savings by bringing the child protection element of their work back in-house goes to show that, when they are run properly, services provided by the Council can deliver better outcomes for the taxpayer than the private sector.”

Heather Dickinson, Group Manager for Legal and Democratic Services at the Council said: “I am immensely proud of the whole team at Nottinghamshire as the accolade would have been impossible to achieve without the willingness of everyone to embrace new ideas, challenge one another, work together and keep up each other’s spirits when at times it was hard work.

“I am privileged to work with such a talented group of committed professionals and the efforts that have gone into transforming our largely paper based legal practice into a dynamic, digital environment is truly transformational. I must pay special tribute to my two Team managers, Geoff Russell and Sorriya Richeux who developed the concept and honed it on a daily basis into the efficient operating model that has become the standard for us today.”

Sorriya Richeux, Legal Services Team Manager, added: “We’re delighted to have achieved recognition through the MJ award for all the hard work we have put into improving our services. In particular, we are extremely proud of the efforts, dedication and support of all managers and staff across the whole team. Without their drive, innovation, willingness to embrace change and being unafraid to fail, we wouldn’t have come close to achieving this transformation.”

Other key changes introduced as part of the review of the team’s office processes included:

•scanning all incoming mail to create electronic documents using EzeScan technology
•operating wholly electronic case files
•standardising how files were saved and named to make them easy to find and giving people greater flexibility to work online from home or different sites
•using inexpensive, off-the-shelf software to create electronic court bundles without the need for printing and photocopying
•piloting the use of and sending files securely by email (irrespective of file size) using Cryptshare technology which requires a password to open any confidential documents.

In all, the changes have brought significant time and financial savings including:

•reducing the number of photocopiers from four to one and cutting the overall staff time spent photocopying by the equivalent of 53 weeks
•an 85% reduction in the amount of paper and toner cartridges used
•a 60% reduction in the ‘back office’ administrative support required.

The 2015 MJ Achievement Awards proved to be a fantastic evening for public services in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire, with Nottingham City Council and Rushcliffe Borough Council also amongst the winners.