Manchester firm Pannone & Partners has linked up with Legal Marketing Services (LMS) and Axxia Systems in a partnership which the firm says has allowed it to double its caseload of remortgage transactions without a similar increase in staff.

Pannones has become the first LMS panel law firm to deploy Axxia's e-Tran application, which allows LMS to initiate remortgage cases from its own STARS database.

Once the instruction is received from a lender, LMS creates its own file within STARS and then passes the instruction to Pannones via e-Tran; e-Tran in turn opens a new file within the firm's Axxia Case Manager system without the need for additional user intervention.

The trio estimate that this system eliminates a typical two-to-three day time-lag seen elsewhere, which represents nearly 20% of the average completion time.

Pannones already uses Axxia's e-Sync software, which enables the automatic updating of the STARS system with a case's progress.

The firm's IT director, David Griffiths, said: 'The staff we previously used for the manual inception can now deal with other tasks, leading to a reduction in the administrative staff necessary to process each transaction - and those updating STARS can now focus on legal, rather than administrative matters.

In fact, we have been able to double our caseload of remortgage transactions while adding only 25% to staff levels.'