Histoire Groupe is a fast-growing law firm based in the Kanto region. Histoire Groupe strongly puts a premium on the experience judicial scriveners provide to their clients, and many office workers are doing their best to support the legal services. We interviewed Yuki Murase, the manager of Histoire Groupe, about why they introduced LINE WORKS and what changed after.
Please explain briefly about your company
We are a law firm providing legal services related to commercial and real estate -overpayment claims, mortgage counseling and proceedings, wills and inheritances, commercial registration, real estate registration, etc. Founded in 2011, we are now running 11 offices based in the Kanto region.
What made you introduce LINE WORKS to your firm?
At Histoire, we have a call center where clerical staffs receive inquiries or requests from clients before they are sent to judicial scriveners. In order to help judicial scriveners focus more on providing the best legal services to clients, we try to have other tasks besides consultation done by clerical staffs.
We have grown rapidly since the very first opening in 2011, and the number of our judicial scriveners and office workers have increased accordingly. We didn’t use e-mail for internal communication, but when there was an urgent message from the client such as asking for the office location or notifying early/late arrivals, we used LINE to let the judicial scriveners know.
However, as the number of employees increased exponentially, we felt the need for business chatting tools other than LINE. With LINE, there was a concern for security issues since it was hard to control every group chat or communications of retired employees. In addition, we had problems matching employees’ faces with their LINE accounts, with more and more people participating in the group chat. But above all, the employees didn’t want their private LINE accounts used for work, which made us turn to LINE WORKS.
What were the decisive factors in introducing LINE WORKS and the advantages of using LINE WORKS?
The decisive reason which led LINE WORKS introduction was that it provides similar infrastructures to LINE, and therefore, no extra education needed. Before introduction, employees used LINE because they could not respond instantaneously to their clients via email. With this, we anticipated that if we integrate LINE WORKS, this would enable our company to provide the employees similar user experience that of LINE.
Also, our company needed a mobile-friendly communication tool for judicial scriveners, who are spending most of their time meeting or traveling with their clients outside the office, and only have a limited time to stay online. We have already tried different other communication tools, but most of them were difficult to use on mobile and failed to settle down after their trial period. In that respect, LINE WORKS was very easy to use with our smartphones, and we could naturally settled down to this tool without feeling any difficulties.
What are the benefits after LINE WORKS adoption?
The level of employee satisfaction has largely increased due to the separation of private LINE account and business contact. Also, from a management perspective, we could worry less on information leakage because the tool has enabled us to manage those retired employees through LINE WORKS, by automatically excluding them from group chats.
Real-time communication is perfectly available just like LINE. While LINE WORKS further provides an organizational contact feature, which is being used as a nominal list of employees. We can now easily recognize whether who is where, doing what. The visibility of all employees has also increased since the profile pictures and names of LINE WORKS accounts are easily matched to the actual person without confusion.
What would you expect from LINE WORKS in the future?
While Message function is frequently used by our employees, functions like Home are yet to be well-utilized. Due to this, we are looking forward to utilize the Home to make important announcements near in the future. In addition, we do not have the Calendar function in the lite plan which we are currently using. To solve this, we are thinking of trying LINE WORKS basic plan which provide the function with the help of our partner, the Satellite office.
※ All details, affiliations, and positions specified were gathered at the time of interview.
