An Interview with Temple Legal

Across our sister company, Red Bullet, and Bullet Digital Solutions we’ve been working with Temple Legal Protection for almost 10 years now. In digital terms, that is a lifetime!

Temple Legal Protection are a successful legal insurance provider, based in Guildford. A small company with an incredible work ethic and culture. Working closely with Laurence and his team, we built, and constantly evolve, their online policy management system – codename “TOPS”. We believe our relationship with our clients goes further than simply “development partners”, we like to assume the role of business analysts and feel part of the wider Temple Team.

We recently took the time to chat in more detail with Laurence about his experience with working with our team at Bullet Digital Solutions.

The hardest thing we’ve always found working with Temple Legal, is explaining, in a few words, what it is you guys do. Picture this, while networking, someone will ask about our clients. We proudly open up about our relationship with Temple. The inevitable question then arrives… “so what do Temple do?”… help us out, in your words, sum up what you do!

We effectively insure legal disputes either before they occur or after they commence. Hence our two main products before the event (BTE) and after the event (ATE).

BTE works like most forms of insurance where your purchase a policy before an incident occurs causing a loss and you then make a claim which would be where we would provide you with a solicitor to win your case. ATE works where an incident occurs, you don’t have BTE cover and you instruct solicitors who arrange a policy on your behalf to provide cover if your case loses.

Both forms of cover enable individual and companies access to justice in a cost effective manner provided by expert legal representation but with the confidence if you are unsuccessful you will not suffer a loss.

To help gauge the journey we’ve come on with you, can you remember your “systems” setup back in 2009?

For ATE insurance most policies were created by law firms via word documents which were then declared to us via a monthly “bordereau” which is, in insurance terms, an excel spreadsheet. A team of colleagues on a monthly basis would input this data into our backend system along with any updates to existing insured “legal cases”. This was a full-time job for four colleagues and also involved many more unquantifiable hours of time taken by our law firm customers in providing the data.

Can you remember back to what the key drivers were for creating an online policy system? Did you do much business analysis work prior to this decision?

There were two key drivers, save our customers time and improve our ability to support them.

By saving our time in data processing we were able to dedicate more resource to customer support and improvements across our business to provide a market-leading service.

The analysis we carried out was focused mainly on feedback from the law firms we worked with and their “perfect world” scenario coupled with our own analysis of time and motion and data quality.

Are those drivers still the same or have they changed as TOPS has evolved and become more integral to operations?

Absolutely, we remain completely committed to providing the law firms and brokers we work with the best possible experience whilst ensuring we remain as agile and efficient as possible. TOPS is central to this as it is our public platform with our customers and day-to-day is as central as the telephone or email to our business.

Your policy management system (TOPS) is now a key part of your organisation, can you list 5 ways it has improved things for Temple and its customers, since its inception.

• Real-time overview of our risks – We know at any point what is being insured 24/7
• Reliable premium rates and policy wordings – Previously with a much an more manual process mistakes were more likely
• Quicker to issue policies for customers and easier to find documents
• Quicker for us to review, approve and pay claims for our customers
• Solicitors can update us their cases at any time and with use of smartphone anywhere which is convenient for them and beneficial to us.

One of the reasons we love working with Temple is that you are always evolving the TOPS system. You listen to our views, you come to us with your organisational aims and work with us to come up with system improvements to support your business growth. Your continued investment in the tool suggests that you now consider it as a valuable asset of the business. Would you agree?

Yes very much so, the system started as a means to save time in creating policies for us and our customers but has developed with the business and our customers to encapsulate all areas of our interactions. This included our claims service, disbursement funding and day to day communications.

Often clients will come to us with very fixed budgets and scopes. Projects are constricted by the bottom line rather than being considered as drivers for efficiency which in turn can save money. What are your views on this and what are the key drivers for continued spend on the TOPS system?

Our strategy is continuous improvement and development in all areas of the business. TOPS is key to this, I don’t think we will ever have a “finished system” because when do you ever have a finished “service”. We can always improve and therefore TOPS needs to as well.

Your sector is not known for its digital evolution, do you think you are one of the forerunners in your industry? And fast forward another 10 years, do you think your market will have changed much in terms of digital technology?

As an insurance company in the legal sector we have tended to mirror our customers and the legal sector is certainly behind other sectors in this regard but it is catching up and there is significantly more investment in algorithm led decision making systems. I would see the next 10 years moving toward more of these “AI lite” solutions. In the insurance industry as a whole I believe block chain will develop over the next 10 years into a much more viable means of sharing data and managing contracts.

Digital Transformation is an industry buzzword, what’s your interpretation of this term?

It would see it as being the means of taking every opportunity to review the methods of working and ensuring that each and every action is evaluated for improvement. The answer to why do you do it that way being that’s the way we have always done is unacceptable and should always be challenged.

And finally… as a fellow Arsenal supporter, I’d like to have seen the Gunners win the title during the last 10 years… alas it was not to be. What do you think their chances are in the next few years? Any hope?

We have been lucky enough to see some amazing players over the last 10 years and I’m sure many clubs would bite our hand off for three fa cup wins in that time. Honestly, I don’t think so but Leicester surprised everyone so there’s always a chance.

Interview with Simon Wilson at Bullet Digital Solutions in December 2019