5 Steps to Implement Software in ANY Law Firm

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Sophie: Welcome to the File Notes podcast, we have David Lisitsa, who is the founder and director of New Law and partner of VXT and an expert on legal technology.

We're going to talk about the whole process of selecting, evaluating, implementing. your whole legal tech stack and the best thing about it is that you can provide unfiltered independent advice working with a range of all of the different technology. Before we get into the nitty gritty of the whole process, can you tell me a little bit about New Law and yourself and your background in the legal industry?

David: Absolutely, thank you for having me here Sophie. So I started in IT um, as essentially a software developer. Realized that, Not particularly good software developer, so, became a solicitor, and then decided to fuse the two sets of experience into what is now a booming market of legal tech. New Law is a consultancy that assists law firms to, essentially improve their bottom line by being more efficient, automating as much of their process as possible.

Sophie: Amazing. And so the steps we're going to go through, we'll start with deciding the requirements of what you need, then evaluating the different legal technology out there, planning for implementation and training and implementation, and then the kind of phase two part, which is optimizing the systems once you do implement them.

And throughout this, we're going to be referring to different practice management systems, document management systems, and time recording systems, and integrations like VXT, but at the end, hold tight, as we'll do a bit of a quick fire on what firms are using what system, depending on who they are.

So the first step, requirements. You mentioned to me that this is where firms really don't spend enough time. What should they be thinking when they're thinking about requirements? What are the key things here?

David: Yeah. So we had an extended conversation prior to this, but. To summarize as much as possible requirements require an engagement or analysis internally about how the current firm runs.

What are the inefficiencies? And the inefficiencies sometimes are incredibly obvious. It could be we don't, if we don't have a signing platform, so we end up signing things physically and scanning into the printer. huge disadvantages. It could be task management and we don't use it. We don't have a centralized task management.

So the first thing to do is to get someone like us potentially to go into your system to go into your practice, talk to your lawyers, review your systems and work bottlenecks are while keeping in mind, because we know what is out there. We know the various technology stacks you can put together. We can identify and see which problems are easy to fix, which ones are difficult, and what steps you can take.

And I guess the first thing is do the investment in time and potentially spend up front because it saves you a lot moving forward.

Sophie: And what are the kind of features that law firms should be thinking about? This is our non negotiables, we have to be having these when we're going out to the market to start looking at different vendors.

David: Well, look, these days, your deliverables are often your documents and your communication. So good document automation, email automation is a critical one, and it is a substantial investment. Because most firms, if you look at their set of precedents, they're disjointed, they're rarely automated, so that's a big deal.

The other thing to look for is some way to structure. Each legal matter so junior solicitors can follow it because essentially any firm can hire a senior solicitor or lots of them, but they're expensive. So, what you need to do is transplant that knowledge from senior solicitors and capture it a little bit in your system.

So junior solicitors or paralegals can do 80 percent of the work and the more experienced solicitors only need to do the last little bit.

Sophie: And. At this stage, when you're thinking about the requirements of what they're going to be needing in a system, should they be thinking about the costs that will be coming up?

David: Yes. So, There's two costs when building a tech. So there's ongoing costs, so what is per user monthly cost of your product stack looks like. And there's the due diligence as well as implementation costs. So, one of the mistakes people make, especially if they've come from an kind of off the shelf system and haven't customized it much is that they assume they can purchase their way.

They just need to buy the right product. While most of the time there's multiple tech stacks that will achieve the same goal. It's all about working out what the implementation includes. What level of customization and integration required and unfortunately it's something that is often overlooked.

So we get like,

Sophie: lawyers do amazing due diligence when it comes to the various contracts that are getting engaged, but the products, no. Very few would go ahead and, get a demo of the product and then set it up and try to run a file through it.

David: Granted, sometimes vendors are a little bit hesitant to let you use the product.

Not VXT. Um, It lets you use the product to, to experience it, but that's often getting access to the various products. Having someone like us get them set up in a functional way and testing a couple of matters, and then reflecting back on the requirements that you've done and see if it hits. That's what's going to ultimately end up with.

Substantive improvements and won't have you go down a particular path only to realize that Actually, you know what you conceptualize in your mind isn't actually possible or prohibitively expensive.

Sophie: So are you saying that some of these practice management systems that people lock into, say, five years, some people aren't actually using them and trying them before they make that investment?

David: 95 percent of firms. would essentially make a decision on a couple of demos.

Sophie: Wow.

Yeah.

David: And again, on the other side, they might do five contract reviews. Yeah. Just for the contract. But often the things that are relevant are, which features does it have? What's its level of customization? Have they promised that certain features are coming and are mandatory for you?

Getting that lockdown is considerably more important. And you generally when you're dealing with any vendor like anything else, they'll show you all the, they don't understand your broader requirements. So, even VXT, which is wonderful, they don't know your document automation requirements.

VXT can't hurt your process, but something like a practice management system or a document management system, choosing the wrong one or choosing the wrong implementation or migrating at the wrong time. can really be detrimental and for most law firms, their daily revenue, let's say take an average, I don't know, 50 years of law firm or 80 years of law firm, could be over 100, 000 a day.

So any sort of disruption, any sort of inefficiency on day one is the cost there, the implementation or the cost of the product pales in comparison to what you could potentially lose. And we've seen a lot of real world examples of that. Not that we've managed, but

Sophie: Yeah, so I guess another question that comes in this kind of planning stage is, system, Do firms change everything at once or do they say we're going to change our practice management system and then we're going to change our document management system or we might get a font system first?

What do you see in that space?

David: What we see and what we suggest varies based on the firm but there's two approaches is everything at once or a bit of a staged process. And there's pros and cons of each. The everything at once approach requires a lot of due diligence ahead of time.

And it's very intensive for the staff. But it does staff don't really like to be in a constant change management mood. Always new things. So there is that idea of getting everything done quickly will allow you to see how things integrate right now. So. VXT might integrate with Clio, and this is what it does.

With, when you do a staged approach, you might not know there's an integration issue until you get to that step of your technology stack. So, all at once definitely has an appeal. For a lot of firms, whether it's because of contracts or because they've invested heavily into an old system, let's say they've automated in their, they use something like Affinity, they've automated hundreds of precedents.

For them to unwind that is an extended process. So, they may be holding on to their practice, or they may be in contract. They may be holding on to their practice management system for a while. So that's where there's an opportunity for easy wins. So, if you, let's say, VXT for example, records the calls, transcribes them, does an AI summary, and potentially pushes it into the practice management system.

That's an easy win. And it's an immediate efficiency improvement. You've got like, and the nice thing is, When you're choosing these products like VXT you want to be, you want to choose products that integrate with a range of practice management systems. So, you might look at, if you need, within your system you don't do any task management at all.

There's no global task, there's no reporting around it. You might look at something like HiveLight which has, which integrates with all the kind of modern practice management system and it can be an easy win. You don't use it. You've introduced it, it can only add value for a marginal, inconsequential cause.

If you don't do any automated time tracking, you might have a look at my times and if you pick up one unit, two units a month per staff member, there's no downside. You're not replacing, you're adding something that might add value. If you're looking in the AI space, you might have Whether it's, there's a range of services, but you might have a particular use case on getting a chronology.

It's something they don't have now. You add it, it adds immediate improvement. But again, the way to think about it is, we want to look at products that are open, that integrate, that have an open API, and that's a bit of a nebulous concept, have some direct integrations, and that you can build your system around.

So that staged approach allows you to have. Small wins, and realistically speaking, in a modern legal sphere, there is a kind of a focus on continued continuous improvement. So you don't implement the systems and stop. You continually review, and you continually try to improve.

Sophie: And so do you think this also requires a change in the mindset of the people in these law firms selecting the technology? Because previously their system might have been able to do all of the things they thought they needed to do in one system.

And now they realize that they might be upgrading their system, but it doesn't have what they assumed it might just have because their old system had that.

David: Yeah that's really important. So, historically, whether you had, I'm just randomly naming this, Affinity, Infinity, Lawmaster they were all in one system.

They had built in accounting, they had built in document automation, built in document management. Requirements have grown, the people are seeking to do more and products specialize because of that. So, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on the firm's size you're looking at building out what you would refer to as a technology stack.

So it may be practice management, document management, precedent automation, platform, intake and portal services. Obviously. There are some products that combine multiple functions. And this is how we think about it. Is, take a customer journey. Go from intake, initial data collection, the phone calls around it, how they attract, the initial cost agreement being sent out, information packs being sent out, capturing that marketing and engagement, to then, Moving it across to running a matter using that data you've collected to then automate initial precedence to trigger a workflow that you might have related to a specific matter how it's run billing completing the matter, and then additional follow up work that you might seek.

Sophie: Okay, so. You mentioned a lot of things there. Should we spend some time going through how you evaluate these kind of different areas? So potentially starting with one of the most important things, document management systems for firms. What kind of technology is being used in the APAC space that is some of the most common and what should we look out for here?

David: Sure. So from document management is a really important one. And as document and email management because it's what lawyers interact with on a daily basis. There's essentially three or two types. One is in build document management into your practice management system. This is something a lot of people are comfortable with.

Whether it's Clio, Actionstep, Leap, Smokeball, older systems like Affinity, Infinity, most of them had a built in document management system. And some were better, some were worse. So for smaller firms, often they can get away with using a built in document management system. As soon as you push into the mid tier so 20 plus your, these days document requirements become more comprehensive.

So how they're tagged, how they're searched and then often firms will look at something like NetDocs or iManage as a document management system. And document management system is, these days is, it's probably a simplistic way of describing it because what they are often they provide bundling, they provide automation they do everything around.

So, yeah, for a mid tier firm, they'd generally be looking at something like NetDocs or iManage that would then connect to their practice management system.

Sophie: Okay, and when we're thinking about automation, there's kind of lots of things going on where you can create workflows with different systems. Do all of the practice management systems have workflows for matters and finance things?

David: Sure. So there's two types of two main types of workflow. About how you would automate your processes. One is a simple kind of stage or milestone based workflow. So if you're running a conveyance, at stage one we have these tasks to do, some of them are finance tasks. At stage two we have this, and something equivalent to a simple Kanban board.

With very good reporting on, well, Sophie, how many tasks did she complete? What was the value of those tasks? What's the momentum? Are we behind in any milestone? That's on the one side, and that's usually the what we suggest as the introduction. So that could be built within your built in practice management system, whether it's Clio, ActionStep, or whatever.

Or it could be with more of a dedicated system, like HiveLight, which has, again, focuses on that workflow management. Then there is the end to end workflow. So Once you start pushing. So once you've experienced that the simple workflow for very specific use case, be it personal, endure conveyancing, you do have situations where economies of scale are important and efficiency is critical.

So for a conveyance, let's say you're doing an $800 conveyance and a lawyer's doing it that's two hours of work. There's a lot of work to do for conveyancing. So what you need is an incredibly structured, so. What type of conveyance is this? Create a task generate a list of tasks to be done generate a list of templates to be created, all the documents need to be automated, notifications to the client, you might have a client portal, or an SMS system that sends out an update, that end to end workflow is important, but often firms make the mistake of, I want to automate in detail every single area, And they don't even use tasks.

Everyone's still using Outlook tasks. And we take a step like, okay, well, are you ready for six months of intense work? So no. First step is, the approach that we take, at least initially, is, it's really simple. Within whatever system you use, you, everything that needs to be done is recorded as a task. So at any point, if nobody shows up that day, and you come in, You can go to any matter, see all the tasks that have been done, all the tasks that need to be done.

They might not be automated, there might not be templates associated with it, but at least you know what needs to be done. So I guess that's the, that's what firms are looking for, that automation, but those are the two main areas and they're almost steps that you take through your automation journey.

Sophie: Does every practice management system have the ability, thinking about the five practice management systems in this area, do they all have the ability now to create those tasks for you? Or do some of them require you to use things like HiFly?

David: The devil's in the detail with a lot of this.

So most systems would have what you would call a task list. So, we need to do the, pre engagement, apply the pre engagement task as they'll create that. In terms of more complex workflow with branching most systems are essentially sub par, or would require substantive customization or even sometimes additional development to get that end to end workflow.

Which is unfortunate because historically all of the systems which are now being replaced, like Affinity or Lawmaster, which are end of life, you could script for fairly complex workflows. But again, those require substantive investment as well. So, most practice management systems will have basic tasks.

Some are better than others. But the main thing to do is look, is first to map out a particular area that you might practice and see. Essentially put it against various practice management systems and see if they work. So a simple thing with workflows could be is there task dependency? Because if you've got a milestone and there's 50 tasks, how do I know which one to do?

Like, is this one ready to be done? Can I call a client and say, your settlement's been done until the settlement, notification's been made? Or until something's been done? So those are the things that we Consider when we do a deep dive and realistically with this process, it's a big education piece for us to the client is to explain that concept because clients come in with assumptions about how they will practice.

And whether it's a 10 user client, like a 10 user firm or a hundred user firm, they come in with the idea that, Hey, can we just have everything automated? This is, but in practice. There's always compromises, and even from their current systems. Some of the things they have now, they may lose when they move, so it's this constant trade off.

Sophie: We go to a lot of conferences for VXT, and when firms decide, we're gonna start automating everything, it's like when they come up to every booth and they say, what AI do you have? It's like, you just want to implement the idea of it, but it shows the value of working with partners like New Law to The questions you just said then, I don't think many law firms would know to ask about dependency for the tasks and the practice management systems.

And like you said before, about not actually getting the trial accounts of practice management systems. . Another area that would be important to evaluate is intake of new clients.

David: Sure. So intake is a bit of a booming market. Post COVID, the exposure of even smaller law firms has been substantial, especially in law that isn't state based, like federal law, family law firms are suddenly getting inquiries from another state.

Migration firms, again, the same thing. So having a engaging intake is critical. And then the intake that you, the data that you do collect to have that translate to the practice management system. So people are getting, so law firms are getting a bit more clever, or at least we assist them to get more clever, in terms of how to engage clients when you're going to the website.

So gone are the days where these are the services we offer. Wills, power of attorney, conveyancing, et cetera. They want some sort of level of engagement. So some clients might have a Do you do it yourself will that would get the client to start doing it for 200 and then start filling it in and if it's a complex will he goes, Hey, book an appointment.

Here's a Calendly appointment link to book an appointment. And the data that's been collected is captured so they can remarket to them. It's in the same way as if you ever try to, I don't know. You've got something in the cart on Amazon. Amazon sent you an email, I was like, Hey, don't remember if you still can buy this or, so that type of engagement people sometimes look for legal services in like a spur of the moment decision.

Like, my husband's pissing me off. Look up family law, or, I'm having a dispute with my business partner, look up family law. I've got a great idea. How do I trademark it? Look up. So, firms are definitely investing more in Google AdWords and they're investing into being found.

Where they generally find difficulties is that when they do direct to their website, to the particular form, is capturing that data and then having what you would call a marketing workflow. And some systems actually do this really well and they're very simple to do. If you look at something like Clio Grow, which is the CRM system that comes with Clio, It has a marketing automation workflow.

So client fills out a form, an email with an information sheet automatically gets sent out with an appointment link. The client clicks an appointment, books a lawyer, next day. That level of engagement is critical because it's such a competitive marketplace. So the, for the running tech perspective is capturing just the right amount of data.

That's not too overwhelming. Getting a level of engagement. And then ultimately, it's still often in a lot of areas, a person, a personal relationship or rapport that you have to build is getting enough investment to speak to a competent lawyer that can then bring it home, so to speak because clients are sticky with lawyers.

So if engagement's been good it's the most critical thing because ultimately intake drives your revenue. And revenue allows you to spend on all these, on our advice, on all the technologies that you may be considering.

Sophie: And I think client expectations are changing a lot in that you want to go to a website and be able to just book a meeting there without having to actually call someone.

Like I know my generation would much rather just be able to book in straight away than calling. And sometimes a lot of law firm websites don't have that option.

David: Absolutely. My doctor I can book online, with advance advance, like hot docs or, I can book in, I'll get a text message reminder from my dentist to go see them every six months.

They'll go, hey, you need to come back in. It's becoming essential. So something really basic like appointment booking either to a specific lawyer or a group of lawyers. It creates that it reduces the barrier to entry. One thing I will say about that is, one of the difficulties with this wider exposure is that there's a lot of tire kickers around.

So you do want to be able to filter. So a lot of services are essentially offering a really easy way to speak to someone, but charging something for it. Even a token amount. Because that filters out, again, people who were never going to engage, or particularly, again, just having a look or comparing prices, and often people don't understand sunk costs.

So, often if they've spent 200 on a basic will or for the initial consultation, they'll generally engage with you. It's almost guaranteed that they will engage with you, as long as that first interaction was positive.

Sophie: Yeah, and staying on the kind of client side. Is, what can you tell me about client portals and how people should be thinking about those?

David: So, client portals, there's a couple of things. So, you log into your bank. You see all the information. You might log into your airline portal and see what trips you've got booked. People are starting to find it a necessity. And it's a way to communicate with clients. That is asynchronous.

So, especially with kind of the drive for firms to do value based billings as opposed to time based billing you're, you don't have necessarily the incentives to, for the client to call you every 10 seconds and see how you're going. So, the portal does allow you to share documents share tasks that the client needs to get done.

Updates. It also allows a little bit of marketing and cross marketing as well. These days, it's a bit more complicated, but you can even get an app on your phone. Like, so, again, Clio, for example, has a Clio for Clients app. So the first time you invite the portal access, they live on your phone. You can send them notifications.

And once you get on their phone, it's great. Then there's more enterprise options where you can have branded apps on your phone that will be your portal. And it could be, and these apps allow you to if you need to provide a document to the client literally take a photo in a secure way to share with the client so portals are becoming more in demand, especially in the when servicing commercial clients, so, you know If you're a law firm that provides ip advice to a bank, for example Or you're a law firm that deals with Big developers and they want to have updates.

So portals can be out of the box in a simple document exchange updates and invoices, or they can be very complex. But often that's how you are able to differentiate yourself and you hear this all the time, but you want to reduce the friction for the client as much as possible. These days, most clients or a lot of clients are very, everyone's very time poor.

So we want, when you're booking a flight, if Often I've made a decision that, Qantas has a better app than Virgin, and I'll just book because it's quicker. My credit cards are already saved. For some reason with Virgin, sometimes I keep having to re enter my credit cards. I'll just book just because it's quicker.

So, it's the same process. It's reducing the friction for the clients, and providing them that asynchronous information, because what you want your lawyers to focus on is the, are the deliverables. The very, Specialized documents the speaking to clients in regards to their matter.

Anything from an update perspective should be done through a portal these days. And that's what firms are looking for.

Sophie: And do all of the practice management systems have one?

David: All of, and this is the, with almost every function, the devil's in the details. So you might have Clio can show invoices, documents, updates.

Actionstep can show documents and messages, but no invoices. You might have Unity, which is Nebula, can theoretically do anything because it's Salesforce, but, might be a couple hundred thousand dollars to get there. So it's often a bit of a trade off. Then there are also NetDocs and iManage document sharing.

So, Really understanding what the specific use case for a particular area will help guide whether you use the built in portal, whether you have a separate system that manages the portal. Yeah, so devil's in the details. They will all say, we have a portal, we have workflows, we have this, we have that.

You need to dig in and you need someone to spend the time to actually do it.

Sophie: And so, still thinking about clients, communication is a big piece of that, and phone systems is a big piece of that, and VXT, obviously, that's us, but a legal phone system. What kind of things are important for law firms to consider when selecting a phone system?

David: Sure. So look, a phone system, surprisingly, is a simpler one, historically. So traditionally, obviously, you had the standard Telstra phone systems, whatever they are. Everyone moved to VoIP because reduction in costs, being able to have it on their phone. So, I'd say in 2024, there's, there have been substantial improvements.

The first stage is getting the VoIP system to exist on the staff member's phone. Gone are the days of having two or three phones. A secure app. They can be removed at any time that has access to the staff member. They can automatically control the hours when the staff member is accessible. That's the first step.

And there's lots of competitors. There's Zoom, Teams, 3CX, VXT. So, products like VXT take the next step, which is integrating into their practice management system. And there's a big move to record calls, transcribe. Put it as a file note on a matter. You might get pushed over to an automated time tracking system like MyTimes to then record the timesheet.

So every interaction is automated. Because often you'll have a chat with the client. A solicitor might be going to court. They can pick up the phone at any time. They can have a chat with the client. And that's all they have to do. They can hang up the phone call. They know the file notes will be there.

They'll often be able to record the time straight away, or it'll be automatically recorded. So, it's purely an efficiency. It's an efficiency that, and it's also, often avoids conflicts when a solicitor might take a phone call, forget to take file notes, that doesn't happen. And it allows, from a management perspective, it allows you to audit the quality of the service that's being provided.

Sophie: When we're thinking about other integrations around all of these systems, you keep saying that like devil's in the detail, because I think often integrations, they might say, yeah, we integrate, but you don't actually know what the integration does.

So it might say, Oh, other phone systems might say, yeah, we have an integration, but. Maybe that doesn't mean contact syncing, that might just mean a particular piece of that. Is there anywhere where war firms get caught out with thinking that things will integrate but it might not actually be what they seem?

David: So we'll use a couple of examples. So, like one integration that you may have is, you're right, contact syncing. So in the VoIP space so when somebody calls you, if that contact is in your practice management system, it might surface it. The next level of integration is pushing the recording or transcription.

Those two, they're a big difference. It becomes even more of an issue with other systems. You might have an automation system. Again, they can only pull out the contact details, but can't pull out all the matter details, like property or settlement date, can't push that. So, there's three types of integrations that you really need to consider.

There's And each one needs to be assessed. So one is a direct integration. So this is where VXT is very strong. They write a direct integration with every practice management system, that's fairly deep. So it, it essentially does everything it needs to do. Like, even with the current integration, getting the file notes in there, getting the transcription, surfacing the data, that's about all a VoIP system needs to do at this point.

But then you do get situations where, so direct integrations are generally better. They're low, they're no cost. You log into Clio, you log into your VXT account, hit OK, done, it works. The next level of integration, especially in, as you get to larger firms is firms, is what you would call low code integrations like Zapier.

So, They're less than ideal. They do work but essentially it allows you to, if the two systems don't have a direct integration, that's the approach. And the final one, and this is the one that often, when they, when clients are told that we can integrate with anyone, all they're essentially saying is we have an open API and you build the integration.

And that's a difficult one. It's a costly one and it's, Not always appropriate to have a third party building integration they support. So what you're looking for when you're first looking is a direct integration. And then you're asking what specifically is it syncing? Contacts, file notes, in automation, is it syncing the fields?

Is it a one way sync or a two way sync? Often firms get caught out with zero integration. So it's such a common thing that every, that the matter accounting is done in the practice management system but the business accounting is zero. Most firms, we have zero sync. Okay, so if you issued an invoice that's gone over to zero, then it's paid in zero, but it doesn't sync back.

So some firms, some products have two way syncing. The Clio has two way syncing. Unity has two way syncing. Some products, unfortunately, there's still one way sync. So there's more duplication of that. So the quality of the sync is something that needs to be analysed. And, unfortunately, it's actually fairly hard for, A lawyer to do.

There's a tiny intricacies that it's difficult for me to keep track of and I invest a lot of time into making sure I'm on top of it. So yeah, devil's in the details and do take the time to do the due diligence. And hopefully as much as possible have the solution presented to you and shown to you and potentially tested that it actually does what it says it does.

Sophie: Great tips there.

When it comes to billing, time recording, super important. And knowing, are you losing time? Where? And there's a couple main players in this space, in APAC. Can you tell me about those?

David: Sure. So, before those, I'll take a step back and say, time recording is important whether you do time based billing, whether you do fixed based billing or value based billing, even if it's just for internal. And I would take it one step further and say you want to record the time that you plan to bill and the time that you worked.

So if you, let's say you drafted a particular document and it took you two hours. But you didn't have your coffee that morning and you're pretty new. And, realistically speaking, so it took you two hours, but you can only really bill an hour. That differentiator is actually fairly good information for the firm, in terms of what can we do to improve.

Do we need a better template, for example? Do we need to automate that? Or is the client spending too much time doing file, so is the solicitor spending too much time doing file notes? Do we want to look at systems that allow you to improve that. At the same time, if you have great systems, your phone call with a client was automatically transcribed, you've got an excellent template that's generated and pumped out, you could be doing a four, four hour piece of work in an hour.

So having that information is really important. But automated time tracking, and what we consider there is I open a document, something captures it, I send an email. There's a couple of big, couple of players in the market primarily MyTime and WiseTime, which will integrate with your Office 365, with your VoIP system, with your document management system, and will allow you to capture that time.

And realistically speaking, especially for time billing firms, the cost of those products is essentially one unit per month. So it might be 40 a month or whatever it is. That's one unit for a lawyer. So if you can find one unit in a month, it's a no brainer. And there are some products that are no brainers, like automated time tracking, automated phone recording, transcribing.

So it's, you, if you don't have it there's no downside. There's absolutely no downside. So, if you don't have it currently, come speak to us and get it. Because it's going to make you more competitive.

Sophie: I love it. And the final kind of piece to evaluate thinking more so about product would be trust accounting.

And I think you mentioned here it's just important to know that they are trust accounting certified. All of the practice management systems that we're talking about in this space.

David: It's a mix. So, so this is one of the difficulties sometimes I have firms have when doing just a broad Google for practice management systems, they'll say, oh, they'll find something.

Something in England or something in the U. S. And the same thing goes for, we've got U. K. and U. S. clients when they find something from, that doesn't, isn't trust compliant. For most systems, at least in Australia and potentially New Zealand there is a formal approval process. So, you'll have systems like Clio, ActionStep, I'm talking about newer systems, Clio, ActionStep, Unity, um, there's a few others that are, go through an approval process by the New South Wales Law Society.

And for a lot of firms that's a big deal because if, while it's not necessarily a requirement for a firm to use a trust approved system, it is a requirement on the firm to use a trust compliant system. So, if they take a system from somewhere, if they try to run it through Xero and there's an issue with the audit, they can't go back and say, well, it's been approved.

So, it's a fairly simple decision, is, you have a look at the New South Wales web, New South Wales Law Society website have a look at the trust approved system, and that should be a starting point. The, in trust more generally systems, there are more, depending on the system you're looking at, they can be more efficient at doing all the compliance, like generating regular trust receipts, Automatically send out trust receipts and trust payments, saving accounting information to make those payments easier and unfortunately, again, it's one of the, you need to try it.

Run through usual trust processes in the demo system and see, is it going to be a substantive administrative burden? And often, but one thing to keep in mind, especially as you move to new systems in 2024. It's, there's usually an increase on the burden on the finance team, but the trade off is an increase in efficiency for the team that's actually doing the work.

So, yes, unfortunately the, often the bookkeepers or accountants might increase their workload, but there might only be one or two of them. There might be 80 solicitors and paralegals whose life is easier, so that you need to be able to balance that trade off.

And often when making a decision on a practice management system the accounting is usually the deal breaker. So does your system do split billing? Does your client need split billing? Your client needs split billing, non negotiable, your system doesn't do it. So that's usually the first step where systems get knocked out, finance.

Once you get past the finance, it's all gravy, it's all improvements.

Sophie: That's where it comes back to knowing what your non negotiables are in the requirements phase and why it's important to go through a process to pick up on things like that and ask all the specific questions. When we're thinking away from product now, but the company that you're actually deciding to partner with.

That's super important, and you've mentioned before that customer service of these different legal technologies sometimes doesn't match what the client is expecting. Can you tell me more about that?

David: Sure, so this, because this is a niche industry and because because it's a niche industry, because people are building out complex technology stacks, providers, even if they wanted to, can't give you a high level of advice and support.

So if you have, if you run Clio and net docs and VXT and my times and they all integrate together, we've built up, like we've put it all together. If you're going to call net docs and say, wait, why isn't my matter opening when I open in clear or Actionstep, then you're not going to be able to answer that.

So, the other thing is a lot of firms these days are putting more into their product as opposed to support. with modern systems, they're fairly reliable compared to older systems. So what they focus on is developing the product as much as possible and have it self serviced. And often the work of actually supporting the client goes towards like a consultancy like ours that has a deep knowledge across the entire stack.

And often if we work through with you, build out your stack, know your integrations. We're in a position to actually provide the support, the support is because it's such a niche area It's something that you have to pay for. It's not a situation where you buy the product like you do with Maybe zero, but even zero doesn't still you still usually get support.

So you do have to pay for support You have to pay for improvements So don't expect that your spend or your So, ongoing engagement ends when you go live. It's a ongoing relationship.

Sophie: And do you think there's any kind of must ask questions when you're deciding to go with the practice management system about the support that they might have or about anything else related to the wider Interaction with them outside of the product.

Oh,

David: absolutely. There's a whole range of things that you should ask every provider. So, and depending on the, so it might not seem obvious, but do I have control of my data? So can I get a copy of my data in a usable format? Let's say if sometimes there's a technical limitations in terms of why you can't get data out.

Sometimes it's a company makes an explicit decision to make it difficult for you to leave. Having control of your data, whether to put into a marketing system, to change systems, to use for something else is a really important one. So do I have access to my data? Show me what the outputs are.

If I wanted to get a copy of my data, what would be the outputs? How much would it cost? The other thing that's pretty critical to consider and to ask is for your specific non negotiables, ask explicitly, does it do that function in writing? Because it might technically do that function, but in practice, it's not workable.

Sophie: And now we've hit planning, we're just talking about data. One big part of the planning process is data migration. What should we be thinking about here? Are there any particular dates as to when it might be best to do this?

David: Sure, so It depends, depending on which region you're in. In Australia, for example, there's some good dates, like end of financial year is usually good.

And the reason for that is For a lot of systems, for a lot of migrations, either difficult, impossible, or just very expensive to move all your historical accounting data. So, end of financial year does help with starting fresh, doing opening balances. Also, potentially end of the trust year. Because trust, every trust account in Australia gets audited.

Doing it across two systems is, can be very challenging, but usually because, there's only two dates and sometimes they're unsuitable for a firm end of the month after your billing cycle, after you've sent out all your bills, is usually a good option, and generally firms, we would advise them to bill out as much as possible to, and then start ready next month.

But the main thing is that you have, That staff have the capacity in the week before, week after the live date, and potentially that first month to take on a new system, to engage with a new system because if that's your busiest peak period it'll cause disruptions.

Sophie: For sure. And important in the planning stage is deciding the scope of Say phase one and phase two.

Can you elaborate what we mean here?

David: Sure. So the, this kind of covers implementation primarily. It can be related to data migration as well. But when we're looking about implementing a product, and which sets of product and what functionality we might want to have, we do need to aim for at least what are the non negotiables.

So. Even if we're moving everything at once, there are certain things when it comes to automating certain workflows, recoding all your precedents that are not achievable within a particular time frame. So, going through, getting a list of requirements, understanding what you'd like to achieve initially, and sticking to it is important because almost universally you'll start getting project creep.

You get a scope creep. And the dates, the initial date will get pushed out and pushed out. And the thing to keep in mind is, especially when trying a new system, is sometimes your initial your initial thoughts about what you'd like to do with the various products are not, don't align with what the product does.

And a much better, you're in a much better position if you implement, let's say, a new practice management system. It's user for three to four months and plan a phase two where you understand the system, you understand where the inefficiencies are and whether you want to invest more time in an ongoing process.

And realistically, for most, especially larger firms an ongoing process is critical. So even with, our clients patching base every six months to do an audit, to see how things are tracking, to always be planning for the next stage. Because your competitors are doing it.

Sophie: And now moving to the training and implementation where we just left off training, you've mentioned that staff need to have capacity around this time to be able to.

Deal with taking on a new system, but how many weeks before to actually be trained on the system? And what's the best way to go about training? Is it documentation about it? Is it in real life training

David: There's a couple of methods of approaching training.

So a couple of things to keep in mind is that lawyers have a job. So as much as I love change management and new systems, they don't. So often lawyers will really only start looking at their systems a week or two before the live date. So an important part, and sometimes a very time consuming and expensive part, is actually documenting the processes around the tech stack you're going to build ahead of time.

And then very intensive training in the first two, three weeks of using the system is usually the best way forward. Some efficiencies have been gained there. Instead of trying to, type up a practice manual with screenshots, these days firms are moving a lot into video recording. So Loom's a pretty popular product where If I want to show someone how to do a trust receipt or how to generate a document, I record myself doing it and I put it in essentially a knowledge based library of videos and, where we all like YouTube, et cetera, and we're comfortable.

It also allows very quick improvements because for me to explain a process of client intake or generating a document in 30 seconds. The time for me to do it, for me to type it up, Put screenshots, it could be hours, and then it's almost immediately out of date. Because, something has changed.

So, that's generally the best approach.

Sophie: And I almost feel like there's more room for error when you're creating a written document, because when you're speaking you're saying all the teeny little things that people might not document when they're writing, and it might be the little teeny bit that someone that isn't that comfortable with technology needed that little bit of extra context on.

You're clicking over here when they're stuck staring at a screen, not knowing where to click.

David: Oh, absolutely. And especially with, many courts moving online and court portals being updated and changed, sometimes just find a place to log in or where do I upload this document? It's so much easier if it's being recorded.

And especially, and we've noticed this even used in, so part of training with some of these systems is actually. Taking the knowledge and building it into the system. So you don't need to, if you've got a list of automated tasks that get created, with what to do and then a loom video attached explaining what needs to be done, you don't even need to have a practice manual because it's at that task level.

So every time they say go to, look up a court date through eFAS or whatever it is, like go to this particular portal to get this information, There's an automated task, whenever this type of matter is open with a link to do it, they almost train just by doing it. So for the people that already know how to do it, they'll ignore the video, and there just might be a task, get the core documents.

But for people who don't, they can do it. And this, it also makes introducing new staff so much easier, because your system, the act of running the matter, is what trains you.

Sophie: Yeah, I really like that idea. And focusing more on the implementation piece now. Should firms be doing a test run of anything?

And can they do a test run before the kind of big go live date?

David: Absolutely. So the, in fact that's preferred. It is obviously, it costs more. So, but the It's almost ne necessary if you wanna get the right result. So realistically speaking if we're doing the implementation data migration we're importing your data, or at least a big subset of your data, we're setting it up as close to live as possible, letting you test it, letting your, we call it user acceptance testing, where we get the solicitors to.

Perform particular tasks like open a matter, generate a cost agreement, record some timesheets, generate an invoice. That process is critical to be able to make sure that when you go live you're not trying to fix it then. That being said, things do slip through the cracks and you do need to fix them, but it captures 90 percent of the issues.

One of the difficulties that you obviously have, and sometimes where a lot of firms come to us is because we're platform agnostic, because we implement, migrate to most of these products, and we know them very well, you have a lot more, we have a lot more ability to set up your entire tech stack. Ready for testing and not have to deal with five or six different vendors that may or may not want that process to run.

And obviously, and this is universal, is as you bring in multiple consultancies, multiple experts, the costs are substantial. And when we, when a migration is done, ultimately, it needs to be done quickly. So. Your pen's down on a Friday, on Monday you want staff to start using it. That process becomes exponentially more difficult the more people are involved, so.

Sophie: Yeah, I could imagine a stressful weekend. Absolutely.

Another thing that you've mentioned to me previously when we've been talking about implementation is don't be afraid to delay. How important is that to convey to everybody?

David: Yes. So, even when planning, especially in, if you're a 80 user, 80 staff and you're picking up what you would call an enterprise system, that's very flexible.

You have particular milestones that you're tracking set a couple of dates, have backup dates because. Often, and this is sometimes unavoidable, is that you had a set of requirements that you initially understood. One of the partners decided there's now another requirement. So, be comfortable turning around to the board and saying, hey, we're not going to go live like this.

I know you had expectations, but it's going to be very risky. And constantly reflect on that risk. Have multiple dates and don't be afraid to delay. The way to stay to schedule is lock in what you need early on.

Sophie: And moving on to that phase two of implementation now, so it's been implemented and now we're thinking about what we're going to change or optimise, what should firms be thinking about in this kind of next stage?

David: Usually the first. If you're just doing, the first step is the switch. So the first step is to get to where you were. Once you've gotten to where you were, it's the common areas where firms need to do substantial investment is usually in their precedence. So, building up precedence leveraging the functionality of the systems they've implemented is important.

And the way to do that is to have someone like us, who may have implemented a system, engaged in an ongoing basis for the first six months. Even if it's four hours a month, even if it's five hours a month. It's for us to review what you're doing, give you feedback, and plan for what your phase two will be.

So we've implemented this new system, we've automated ten precedents, people are happy with it. But we want to continue that progress or we've implemented this great task management system, but no one's using it What do we do there? Do we make a mandatory? Do we provide additional training? So the most difficult part of from an implementation perspective is getting the people on board and that ongoing training and support is critical a lot of firms do think that it's a once off and then we're done and But it's an ongoing process.

So, definitely when you're putting a project together, factor in from both the pricing and time commitment to have someone like us support you at least for the first three months.

Sophie: I love it. And I think there's so many questions podcast can now take away and ask vendors or reach out to New Law for help in that.

If they wanted to just get straight to the answer of knowing what practice management system they can use, obviously we can't tell them right now, but I'd like to go through kind of five of the main practice management systems in the APAC kind of space, and for you to tell me what kind of firms using those, or what they're known for in terms of their feature.

So that might be the size of the firm, or one system's known for its document management, or

David: Sure. So, I'll give a broad answer to that. So, in terms of the types of products you're looking at they generally range from simpler out of the box, more functionality out of the box, but potentially hit a wall or systems that don't do much of the box out of the box that are more enterprise focused.

But I'm more likely to with a lot of investment and customization to offer a broader feature set that it is a little bit blurred these days because products do have open APIs, they integrate with other products that can be expanded. So, but what we generally find is at the smaller end of the market, you might have her leap smoke ball, and this is by no means universal leap smoke ball.

Clio and ActionStep will pick up some 5, 10 user , law firms but those same products can, we've got 50 user clients that are Clio or Leap or ActionStep for better or worse. So generally what you find is what a 10 user firm wants, it's the same things that a 100 user firm wants. They want good portals.

They want good intake. So. In my opinion, and this is, again, depends on the additional investment that you make and depends on the tech stack. Generally Smokeball and Leap are near the bottom. Clear on Actionstep, Straddle the mid tier. You might have Unity, which is recently called Nebula, in mid tier to upper mid tier.

But if, but as you build out your tech stack, you do find, as long as the systems integrate, As long as it hits the requirements, often you lean towards something that's a little bit simpler to get going. Unless you're very clear that you have very high end requirements. So, if you're starting, one of the challenges in choosing a system is whoever, whichever vendor you speak to will, right, will obviously say this is the best system and it's suitable for you.

So this is why it's really important, even before going out to vendors, is to speak to someone like us. We'll demo the systems for you, go through the requirements, go through a set of trade offs, and then help you shortlist a couple of products. And understand not just which product is better or worse.

Clio by itself is different to Clio with NetDocs. Actionstep by itself is different than Actionstep and Smart are drafted together. So, sometimes you may have a deficiency in a particular area. CRM or workflow. But if you buy a complimentary product, you can put it together. But look, have a look at the common products now that are trust approved in Australia.

Smokeball, Leap, Clio, Actionstep, Unity, Law App, which is a fairly new one. MatterX, which is a fairly new one. There's nothing wrong with looking at all of them, getting a demo from all of them. And each one will tell you this is an excellent product, that it will do everything you need, but really speak to us first.

We'll cut through the noise and shortcut six months of back and forward to get to a point where you're ready to actually make a decision. And then often you need someone, whether it's us, whether it's an external consultant, whether it's even someone, you need someone to almost manage the vendor interaction.

Yeah, because we know essentially what the vendor should be doing for you and we just want to make sure that occurs. So let's, let, unfortunately, I'm a lawyer as well in the same way as our legal clients sometimes don't take our expertise as lawyers don't. Take our expertise as consultant specialists in that area.

And that's the one thing I'd probably tell you to do. Is for the consultancies that are agnostic, like us, take the time to listen to our advice. And, that, it'll give you a better outcome.

Sophie: I love it. So many tips there. That's all the questions I have, but hopefully everybody has knowledge of what process they should be going through and what questions they should be asking and who they should be using as a partner to achieve their goals.

So thank you so much, David.

David: Thank you so much.