From manual to modern

Manual methods, modern demands

Brittany Lanphier, CPA, is the owner and managing partner of Lanphier LLP. She is passionate about leveraging technology and process improvements to empower her team and deliver transformative advisory services to clients. As the firm grew, Lanphier recognized a critical need — advisory work was still rooted in manual processes and dependent on senior staff’s experience. She wanted a solution that could modernize delivery, empower junior staff, and scale the firm’s impact. “We have been in such a manual phase of this where so much of it has to just come from us and our experience,” Lanphier noted. “I’m thrilled for Ready to Advise to allow less experienced staff or advisors build that confidence of figuring out what strategies are going to be most beneficial for our clients.”

Challenges

Lanphier LLP had no shortage of advisory expertise. With decades of experience and a strong reputation for strategic tax planning, Lanphier and her team were highly skilled at identifying client opportunities. But that expertise came with a hidden cost — advisory delivery was deeply manual and heavily reliant on intuition and experience. This meant that junior staff — while eager to contribute — often lacked the tools and confidence to participate meaningfully. Advisory work lived in the heads of senior practitioners, making it difficult to delegate, replicate, or scale. As the firm grew, this model became increasingly unsustainable.

Despite their advisory expertise, Lanphier LLP faced persistent challenges:

• Manual, experience-driven processes. Identifying and implementing advisory strategies relied heavily on senior staff’s knowledge and intuition, making it difficult for less experienced advisors to contribute.
• Inconsistent strategy execution. The lack of a standardized, tech-driven process led to variability in how advisory services were delivered and which strategies were considered.
• Scaling advisory services. Lanphier wanted to enable more junior staff to participate meaningfully, to support the firm’s growth and serve more clients efficiently.
• Missed opportunities. The firm needed a way to uncover and evaluate a broader set of strategies for each client, beyond what could be managed manually.

Smarter tools, stronger teams

Excited by the promise to modernize the advisory process and address their long-standing challenges, the firm adopted Ready to Advise — an AI-powered solution from Thomson Reuters designed to streamline and scale advisory services.

The implementation focused on:

• Guided implementation. Delivering step-by-step instructions for executing strategies, which enabled junior staff to contribute confidently and ensured consistency across engagements.
• AI-driven strategy identification. Expanding the range of strategies considered for each client by surfacing options that staff might not identify on their own.
• Enhanced delegation. Empowering senior advisors to delegate more of the execution work, freeing up their time for strategic planning and client engagement.
• Trustworthy foundation. Building confidence in the strategies knowing that they were built on the trusted tax technical foundation of Thomson Reuters Checkpoint platform.