The Teal Tracker compliance technology platform is the solution for all law firms’ compliance needs. Here, we explain why we built the Teal Tracker, and how it’s benefiting law firms.
What is the purpose of the Teal Tracker?
The Teal Tracker compliance technology has two core purposes.
1. Keeping track of all your records
The Teal Tracker’s first core purpose is to make the activity of collating law firm compliance information easier.
Firms know when there are issues, and there’s usually a procedure for notifying someone. However, it’s often done via email, or by filling in a form and then emailing it to someone. This is how control can be lost and it becomes just another email stuck in someone’s inbox. This makes such records extremely hard to demonstrate to a regulator.
Examples might be a list of complaints, where somebody then has to sit down for hours, scrolling through emails and trying to find the relevant ones.
In practice, and in reality, there are still examples of printing off documents and putting them in paper files. However, this is inefficient, lacks security and could compromise confidentiality.
So, this is the primary reason the Teal Tracker was built.
2. Analysing the data to help you make informed decisions
The second core reason we built the Teal Tracker compliance technology is because there’s a lot of beneficial information contained within the data that you collect as a result of breaches, file reviews or training records. This data holds the answers to enable you to start to identify when there are problems with a particular person, or a particular area within the firm.
Because the data is fragmented, normally across the firm in emails, folders or on bits of paper, it usually can’t be analysed. As a result, firms don’t really have a good handle on whether their compliance is working or not.
The Teal Tracker is the solution. Once the data is collected in the Teal Tracker, it can then start to analyse and report on it. This will enable you to identify issues and let you know where the areas of focus need to be.
For example, if there’s a spike in complaints as a result of somebody not getting back to people, that may be a capacity issue. Through the Teal Tracker, we can let you know that a particular department appears to be quite busy, needs more people, or needs less work.
With the methods law firms currently use, this can be guesswork to a degree. The Teal Tracker provides evidence for these things, so that you can make informed decisions.
How do law firms benefit from the Teal Tracker?
Law firms can benefit from the Teal Tracker in a number of ways. However, here are the top 5 benefits of the Teal Tracker:
1. Collecting all information in one place, without duplication
First of all, the activity of collecting information from the business in relation to their compliance can be streamlined. A really simple example of that is what we collect through our ‘Incident Management’ module, called ‘what’s happened?’.
The ‘what’s happened’ form is what you’d usually call an ‘incident reporting form’. We’ve named it ‘what’s happened’ on purpose, to engage people, so that they use it more freely.
We’re curious about why things are happening and encourage everyone in the business to use it for anything they see that’s not going to plan, without any inherent blame attached. In the ‘what’s happened?’ form, you select the category of what’s happened, for example, a complaint, a potential claim, a breach, or a near miss. It then automatically populates a register. If you’re currently collecting that information by email from people within your firm, you’ll have to copy it onto a register.
2. Easy access to reports and analytics
Once that information is properly captured within the Teal Tracker, it can start to easily analyse the data and reflect that back to you to let you know. On the first page of the Teal Tracker, you’ll find the ‘heat map’. The heat map is designed so that you have access to instant and continuous visibility of the situation. You’ll instantly be able to recognise if you have any emerging issues that you need to start dealing with, and you can run various reports which you can also tailor.
The reports will show up on your desktop enabling you to know what to prioritise, as we understand that budgets and compliance resources are always really tight.
3. Helps prioritise your budget
Firms spend a lot of money on compliance interventions. If you’re looking for solutions, training, writing a new policy or rolling out a new procedure, you might not feel confident that it’s actually working. The Teal Tracker solves this problem.
It shows you what is and what isn’t working, both systemically and individually. As the Teal Tracker is reflecting back into the business, you can then make informed decisions as to where to put your money to derive the highest impact and benefit, reduce the highest risks, and affect your highest priorities.
4. Protecting sensitive compliance information
When we collect compliance information, it’s sensitive by its very nature. You need to ensure access rights are robust, as it could be training records, training plans, staff development needs, suspicious circumstances, or reports that the business is surfacing. You need to control who has access to that information and where it sits.
If a suspicious circumstances report is sent via a paper form or an email to the MLRO, it can end up setting in an inbox or being filed on the client file. This means other staff may have access to it.
If a suspicious circumstances report is submitted, it’s likely that you’ll stop working on that file for a period of time. If the client gets frustrated and makes a complaint, there’s a number of potential serious consequences that can occur if the report is on the client file.
For example, if you’ve made a report out to the police, the tipping off events under the Proceeds of Crime Act could kick in. If the client calls to ask why is nobody ringing them back, and one of your staff sees on the file that you’re waiting to hear from the National Crime Agency, they could accidentally reveal this to the client. This is something that’s so easily done in innocence.
When building the Teal Tracker, we thought about how can we give firms a safe place to put that information, where they can limit and control the access to who can see it, and prevent it from accidentally be filed anywhere it shouldn’t.
5. Access to a wealth of compliance training
If you choose the Teal Tracker compliance technology for your law firm, you’ll also have access to Teal College.
Teal College has a vast amount of training courses in AML, GDPR and Regulatory Compliance in addition to Teal TV, which hosts webinars and videos to help your law firm stay compliant and protected.
Get in touch
The Teal Tracker is here to revolutionise the way compliance works in law firms, keeping you, your firm and your clients safe. For more information or to book a demo, simply get in touch with our experts today.
