Bury Council is located in the North West of England and consists of six towns; Bury, Prestwich, Radcliffe, Ramsbottom, Tottington and Whitefield.
The Local Authority has been using safedrop now for a number of years to send bundles to court, law firms and individuals. Their staff also use safedrop for other things due to the flexibility of the product, and there are more and more use cases going forward given the current situation that they can use safedrop for.
Life before safedrop – “It was a labour intensive and expensive process”
Andy Carlile, Practice Manager at Bury Council said that the Local Authority had nothing in place to securely send or receive large documents or bundles prior to using safedrop. They had a method to produce digital bundles, but no way to securely deliver the bundles to a third party. At the time, the Courts were still receiving only paper bundles, but Andy remembers the preparation and delivery of paper bundles to be an incredibly time consuming, labour intensive and expensive process. Often bundles needed preparation with multiple representatives, and compared to the modern way of working with digital bundles, and secure delivery – a lot of time was spent just to get a bundle ready to deliver to court.
Frustration “Distribution of multiple paper copies is time consuming and difficult”
Andy told of the frustrations his team faced before using safedrop. Producing, copying and distributing paper copies of bundles used to be time consuming, and difficult. Occasionally there were stories of people losing a copy of the bundle (which presents its own security issues), and if there was an update to the bundle after it had been produced, it was then incredibly hard to get that update distributed and updated into each copy of the bundle. Andy also said the costs of producing and sending paper bundles (both financially and environmentally) were astronomical.
“The courts are happy to receive bundles using safedrop”
Bury Council integrate safedrop with their case management system. Using safedrop makes sending bundles so much easier, and frees up their team to focus on other important tasks. Andy loves the fact that safedrop can take files of any ‘realistic size’ (even a 25,000 page document), and it just makes the sending process more secure and simple. Andy said “The courts are happy to receive bundles using safedrop. The fact that courts, law firms, and individuals are happy to receive documents using safedrop is testament to how easy it is to securely deliver them using the system.”
“Occasionally we receive bundles using a competitor, but our team don’t save their passwords, and logging in/setting up accounts to receive bundles takes time”
Andy told us that the team at Bury Council do occasionally receive bundles using an alternative electronic method, but the team are required to set up an account on the alternative system, and often forget their passwords (and don’t save them). As a result, they have to reset their password (or sometimes set up new accounts), which takes time and when there are deadlines to be met, time becomes even more important.
We asked Andy what the single biggest reason to recommend safedrop is. His reply: “I can give you so many, price, easy to use, flexibility, time and money savings, simple integration with our systems…”
“safedrop just makes sending bundles simple, it just works”
Andy Carlile, Practice Manager, Bury Council.
If you’d like to speak to Andy about his experience with safedrop, email us at hello@safedrop.com and we will put you in touch with him.
