How compliance software can simplify the role of a COLP & COFA

The newly created roles of COLP and COFA are subjects of interest for every solicitors firm throughout England and Wales. Naturally, people are questioning their administrative impact and investigating methods of simplifying compliance with outcomes focussed regulatory requirements.

Steve Shore had over 20 years experience as a solicitor, including time as a Managing partner at Richmond’s solicitors, before moving to pursue a successful role with Doncaster Chamber of Commerce. Drawing from this experience, he believes that a pragmatic approach can allow compliance with OFR to become a value-add for solicitors.

History has shown that the firms who are most proactive to change are the ones who thrive.

Quality Standards like ISO9001 can make the difference

Today's information conscious clients are looking for Quality Standards certification such as ISO9001 as a way of verifying a firm's capabilities.

By implementing a software based quality management and compliance solution a medium sized Solicitors firm may benefit from business efficiencies and a public facing 'stamp of approval' which would definitely help from a marketing point of view.

Steve talks about how Compliance and Quality Management Software can simplify the role of a COLP and COFA. He makes particular reference to simplified audit, document control and search capabilities.

Steve Shore, EQMS Compliance for Solicitors team lead:

 Steve Shore, EQMS Compliance for Solicitors team lead:

“For me, the whizziest bit of the technology is Audit.

You put in (to EQMS) audits for various systems and processes, file reviews are a great example, and the EQMS system enables you to interrogate the information that’s in there, to get out concise reports that not only shows your compliance with the regulations, which is an auditable requirement of OFR, but also gives you really important management information about issues around training and quality that can actually improve your practice.

So EQMS as a tool, not only gives you great compliance management but also great management information to use on your business”

“I think back to my time as Managing Partner at Richmonds, I was responsible for client care, training and quality and all sorts of regulatory compliance.

Whenever I had to do an analysis I had to sort through rooms of filing cabinets and piles of paper to then spend hours collating the data to complete the reports. With EQMS it is all stored digitally, properly indexed and searchable and I could achieve the same work in a fraction of the time – it really is a time and money saver”