
Driving process efficiencies and reducing costs for our customer.
Down-to-earth, straightforward, and strategically switched-on, Burges Salmon offers complex legal expertise coupled with a wide range of market sector experience to large organisations, entrepreneurial businesses, public sector bodies, families, and individuals.
In January 2023, Burges Salmon was named for the second year in a row by RollOnFriday the ‘Best Law Firm To Work At’.
Objectives.
Burges Salmon appointed Agiito in November 2015 to manage their business travel and venue-find requirements following a competitive tender process. A key success of our relationship with Burges Salmon is that we are open and honest and always looking at ways to drive process efficiencies for both parties.
Working with one of Burges Salmon’s Legal PAs we discussed ways to implement process efficiencies into their contract and agreed that Group Accommodation was a great place to start as these bookings were being requested more frequently and booking offline was time consuming for their bookers.
Managing group accommodation via our proprietary online (and award winning) meetings management tool Meetingspro® would empower Burges Salmon bookers, offer process efficiencies and reduce costs, whilst supporting the challenge to book online. Shortly after the ‘Online Group Accommodation’ project began, it became apparent that this was the perfect time to review and update their existing business coding system in both our online and offline tools.
Initially set up when we started working with Burges Salmon in 2015, it became apparent that budgets had been streamlined and with this, updates needed to be made and reporting lines built into our systems regarding ‘Nominal and Matter code’ reporting. This coding system is important to law firms as we need to make sure they receive the correct reports and codes are applied to the right budgets.
Working with Burges Salmon’s Finance team, we reviewed their existing coding which provided visibility on business travel that
would be chargeable and non-chargeable to their clients with a view to having the project completed before the start of the new tax
year in 2022.

Solution.
Working with Burges Salmon’s Operations Travel Assistant, we discussed training options and key communications that would advise
the firm’s bookers of the new service provision. With the dates agreed, communications and portal messaging signed off, implementation began.
We held two virtual training sessions in April and May 2022, which were attended by key stakeholder PAs. The training session walked them through the online group accommodation process within Meetingpro® which would drive process efficiencies whilst enabling bookers to control their own group bookings with full transparency of their requirements as well as online reporting.
Whilst the online booking process is quick and easy, Burges Salmon bookers had the assurance that they could take the booking offline (at any point in the booking process) and one of their designated team would be on-hand to support.
We then met with key stakeholders from Burges Salmon’s Senior Finance team and Agiito’s Finance Manager in June 2021 to talk through and make sure we fully understood their coding requirements. We had a challenge where we were asked if for some reason a ‘Nominal Code’ wasn’t required, that our system would automatically refer to a ‘Matter Code’ – which wasn’t as straight forward as it sounded.
So we liaised with our in-house IT and Development teams and appraised them of Burges Salmon’s request. Working with our online portal provider, they planned the project, and identified the changes to be made, before testing and setting the process up in our online and offline systems.
Whilst this project took a little under six months to complete, not only were we able to respond to our customer’s specific request, but we also now have a template to manage similar coding requirements for law firms and their specific finance reporting needs.

This project of moving group accommodation bookings online has helped our bookers to take full ownership of group booking requests and enabled them to contact hotels directly for quotations as required.
Burges Salmon has an extremely good working relationship with the team at Agiito and we all support each other effectively.
The new coding system has made travel booking easy for our bookers and reporting budget capture for our Finance teams has been very successful.
It was a bespoke request and Agiito met the challenge and was hugely supportive to meeting Burges Salmon needs.
Operations Travel Assistant, Burges Salmon LLP
Results.
Burges Salmon now has the system and ability to manage all its group accommodation requirements online via Meetingspro®, the immediate benefit being the ability to search, book and confirm these bookings themselves, with the additional benefit that their offline team is on-hand to support if needed.
Online adoption for group accommodation went from fully offline and to 52% shortly after ‘go live’ and currently sits at 80%.
The new coding system was implemented by 4 April 2022 in preparation for the new financial year. This new process worked extremely well for Burges Salmon and whilst no booker training was required, we once again supported in sending communications to its booker community and ensured our offline travel and meetings teams were fully appraised of the new process.