As the practice of law continues to go increasingly digital, lawyers and their clients are constantly on the lookout for a better way to communicate and collaborate on everything from simple information sharing to complex projects and transactions.
HighQ is that better way. A recent addition to the Thomson Reuters family, HighQ offers law firms and businesses a powerful way to streamline their collaboration and improve the delivery of legal services. With the HighQ platform, both sides of an engagement are empowered to be more effective, efficient, innovative, and proactive. In a sea of technology options, HighQ is the platform you need when you want to work smarter in today’s demanding and competitive legal market.
The Power of HighQ
The folks behind HighQ started out with a mission that sounds simple enough: to transform the way law firms and corporate legal departments work and engage with their clients and colleagues. While the effort that went into creating HighQ might have been anything but simple, its developers succeeded in creating a sophisticated, user-friendly way to make collaboration and engagement a breeze, complete with efficient automation of legal processes and better management of complex projects and transactions.
HighQ works by offering a platform of many different capabilities that users can combine to solve their most pressing business problems. It offers seven core capabilities: document management, content management, task management, social collaboration, file sharing and syncing, smart forms and sheets, and a dashboard builder. Five additional capabilities – data visualization, document automation, enterprise knowledge management, AI, and workflow automation – can be added separately. All of these capabilities are built upon a foundation of security and compliance, auditing and reporting, and APIs and integrations, which extend throughout every aspect the HighQ platform.
You can think of each of these capabilities as the building blocks you use to customize your HighQ experience. Just pick and choose the functionalities you need to solve a specific problem or to handle a given project, then combine them in a template solution and hit deploy. All those capabilities are now packaged together for a given matter, and the template can be saved and redeployed for similar engagements in the future. The various building blocks can be combined and recombined in any number of ways to solve whatever problems might arise.
So, what can you do with HighQ? The answer is basically anything, but there are five overarching ways that law firms are using HighQ to engage with clients and improve business:
- Promoting the firm and attracting new clients
- Engaging current clients by adding value and insight
- Securely sharing content and communicating with external clients
- Delivering legal services and work product
- Working and collaborating internally on projects
HighQ also conveniently integrates with best-in-class solutions in a variety of areas, including document automation, AI, and document management, among others. With HighQ, you have the most advanced ecosystem of connectivity solutions available, meaning that it will quickly become your home base for all your legal work.
How it Works
When you first log in to your HighQ platform, you see a main dashboard for a particular engagement, which can be specifically branded with the name of that client.
On the left is a list of projects (called sites), which serves as a sort of virtual filing cabinet for the engagement. In the center is a feed of your recent activity. If this reminds you of a social media interface, you’re not wrong – the feed offers social collaboration capabilities, such as likes and comments. On the right are your files and tasks, so you can easily find the things you’re working and any tasks that have been assigned to you (whether by you or created by someone else).
When you click into a file, you see it in an online viewer where you can add annotations, make redactions, and view metadata. You can also internally share files or send them to external users. HighQ places a high priority on security, so you can always set permissions and limitations on who can access files, and how.
The tasks area offers a range of legal project management capabilities.
From here you can add tasks, review the details of current tasks, access documents related to a given task, change task priority simply by clicking and dragging, and much more.
Back on the main dashboard screen, when you access a particular matter (site), you get a new dashboard that you can customize with modules. This allows you to build and tailor a screen that shows you a range of data visualizations to better understand your project at glance.
You can also click into any given visualization to see an iSheet, which is essentially a combination database/spreadsheet that compiles all the information you need to track a matter.
There’s also a separate firmwide data dashboard that incorporates the social collaboration features of all users’ individual dashboard on a given matter and allows users to add items or visualizations for the whole firm to see.
Users with admin rights can access the project’s workflow engines and create rules for how the platform functions across a project, using if/then logic. There’s no coding or technical skill required – any user can easily manage how the platform functions, from how tasks trigger other actions to how iSheet edits cause documents to be created.
While you’re seeing all that, your clients see a different, more simplified dashboard, branded with your firm’s name.
Your clients have easy access to whatever content you want to share – essentially a one-stop-shop for your thought leadership and insights, where you can demonstrate your expertise. You can think of this as a way to commoditize the knowledge that previously just sat hidden in your files or in your head and make it available to your clients 24/7 in a useful environment that’s linked to what they’re working on.
Your clients can also communicate with you, feed you matter information and data, and submit legal service requests, as well as access work product and visualizations of the work being done on a project.
Simply put, there’s not much HighQ can’t do when it comes to collaboration between lawyers and clients, whether you’re at a law firm or a corporate legal department.
Try HighQ to solve your next big business problem, and you’ll soon find yourself using the platform to manage all your client engagements. HighQ currently works with approximately a million users at over 100,000 different organizations, including 75% of today’s Fortune 500 companies.
Lawyers are always looking for a better way to communicate and collaborate. HighQ is the answer. This is the only toolkit you need to solve even your most complex business problems and provide the best client service possible.