Ethos

Our clients cannot afford gratuitous legal costs to dispose of nuisance or even critical litigation. Ours is a frugal approach to litigation, we utilise advanced technology and a minimalist approach to get the job done at the least cost to our clients. Our focus is always on winning the case, rather than going through the motions. This has endeared us to our clients and given us a formidable reputation amongst our opponents.

Efficiency
Bransgroves Lawyers have a unique firm culture. Everything we do is driven by efficiency and necessity. The purpose is to get the job done with the least expense to our client and to be rewarded for this by additional work and referrals. These ethos are applied equally to our long term clients as to our clients with one-off litigation. To this end, we consistently review our practises and procedures to remove all vestiges of archaic legal traditions including:

1. We never write letters to our client commenting on letters received from others, this only racks up fees. Instead we rely on our clients’ ability to read.
2. We run a paperless office. If our clients ask for a document they get it instantly at no charge because for us it is only a few clicks away at most. We can zip up our entire file and make it available for download from our secure FTP site.
3. Instead of keeping our clients in the dark we copy our clients on all internal emails regarding their matter. This keeps them in the loop, and allows them to arrest any misconceptions we have, before our time and their money is wasted. We forward all correspondence from the other side to our clients before we even read it. We cc. our clients on all correspondence with the other side.
4. We have dropped the traditional practice of faxing documents, then stamping them with 'faxed', and then posting them. Instead, we send all letters as pdf files attached to email.
5. We use electronic discovery and always fight for no discovery, or as a fallback position, informal discovery (without the need to prepare lengthy useless lists, that no one will ever read) in order to keep the costs down.
6. We avoid lengthy and expensive conferences with clients by having our clients remotely log into our system so that the work can be done over the telephone (with both the solicitor and client seeing the words on the screen as they are typed). This allows extensive affidavit preparation to be broken into more manageable chunks and reduces waste brought about by fatigue.
7. All our paralegal staff are very high-scoring law students, so there is a desire to learn, improve, and the intellectual capacity to avoid making mistakes.
8. All our solicitors are extensively cross-trained to ensure resources can be re-deployed to address peaks in work flow and to allow for absences. Together with our technology, this allows a seamless and stress free take-up of the fluctuating demands of our clients.

Barristers
Even with the best solicitors in the world a client can still be aggravated, over-charged, and poorly represented if the barrister selected is not the best choice.

1. We never use a barrister who is of unknown quality. Most of our barristers have been with us for years. Our stable of barristers only grows when we have found ourselves up against an outstanding barrister whose legal knowledge, case preparation and acute reasoning over a lengthy trial convince us he is a valuable acquisition. 
2. We rarely conference with barristers. We find that conferences are not the most efficient way to appraise the barrister of your issues. We have also found that barristers tend to need to research their work after the conference in any event. Therefore we brief in writing and obtain advices in writing wherever possible. This has the added advantage of keeping you, our client, in the loop.
3. We only use barristers for contested hearings. For all interlocutory mentions and appearances we use our solicitors. For return of subpoena and directions by consent we use our law student paralegals. As well as being cheaper it is a formula to get the best outcome as our solicitors know your case, while a barrister will need time to get up to speed.
4. We brief barristers simply by sending a short email attaching the documents they need. We do not write 20 pages of elaborate “observations”, nor do we put together tabbed folders and other redundant material.