Digital Transformation is your future
60-80% of a company’s average IT budget goes into keeping legacy technology running. The Law Society have an excellent report on lawtech adoption that we highly recommend you read, by and large the issue is that law firms of all sizes experience a lack of oversight and expertise to adopt lawtech despite wanting to.
Without an IT Refresh at regular intervals, every three to five years for example, existing systems become older, bulkier and in ill repair – damaging the performance of your business and your reputation among your customers.
Hayachi Services have assisted a range of law firms on Digital Transformation projects since our founding, from upgrading Document Management Systems (DMS) to assisting top-10 law firms in implementing and supporting Practice Management co-developed with Aderant.
We understand that sometimes systems do work well-enough to keep them for a while longer, but equally we have seen our clients flourish after adopting solutions such as NetDocuments or co-developing Aderant Expert 8 – improving the delivery of legal services as well as streamlining billing in order to keep their houses in order.
We ourselves are a Clio Affiliate Partner, a lawtech firm that has a strategic partnership with The Law Society. Clio is actively working to help practices across the world adopt leaner and more efficient processes – a cloud based and all inclusive practice management software solution with sales and marketing (CRM) functions as well.
Software is an organic thing, it is continually being added to: from security fixes and re-orienting to new ways of working, to facilitating the creation of new Cloud-Native law firms. Having a stagnant software portfolio hinders the success of any business, and as above can cost significant sums of an IT department’s budget to maintain ‘just about working’ systems rather than ones which enable your firm to flourish.
Managing Software Lifecycles
If Digital Transformation is your future as a business, then managing software lifecyces is the central component to make sure you are not stranded in the past. Unfortunately it is the case that many Managed Service Providers (MSPs) refuse to recognise that failing to invest in one’s most critical systems is a recipe for failure.
MSPs often fail to notify clients that their core-systems are aging, often they are not even aware of (or care for) the software portfolio that enables your business to function – this often results in unexpected cost pressures due to ’emergency upgrades’ that creep up on you when they were in fact perfectly foreseeable.
We once assisted an MSP in retaining a customer for whom they blithely looked on while the customer’s domain expired – rendering all systems down (including the VPN), it was not a nice thing for them to do. We helped them retain the customer nonetheless, but that client are now using a totally different domain from their founding ten years ago – through no fault of their own.
MSPs will often demand payment in such circumstances despite having put you in the unenviable situation in the first place, as with the one above, and utterly fail as custodians of your IT infrastructure – not lifting a finger in times of crises unless the invoice is paid.
Hayachi Services are not an MSP – we do not offer a ‘Managed Service’ nor do we accept that our clients can settle for anything less than the best – it costs time, care and expertise of which we have aplenty. As an IT Consultancy we refute that a ‘just about managing’ IT System will ever be sufficient for customers large and small.
Be it accounting software, a DMS, time-recording and billing software, age-old Practice Management systems or even the humble Email exchange – each and every one has a lifecycle that needs to be accounted for. Often software lifecycles require yearly version updates for compliance with updated laws, and become End-of-Life after three to five years.
But with solutions such as Clio this isn’t necessary because you can trust in an established and approved vendor to manage the technical elements of your Practice Management system so that you can focus on serving clients.
If this is not being explored in a Discovery Session before the start of an IT Refresh Project it suggests your supplier cares more for deploying the system than sustaining it – the latter being your problem, not theirs. Once again, we refuse to take this line and this is why our Discovery Sessions come at no cost to new or existing clients.
Knowing when your vendor intends to deprecate a platform is central to sustaining a successful IT system and helps your firm to avoid unexpected costs. It sounds simple but in fact it takes a great deal of care and planning, which many of our competitors fail to recognise or practice.
Investing in your future saves you money
There is a reason why we work with leading law firms across the UK to facilitate Digital Transformation projects with them – it is a worthwhile exercise to do.
We save our clients money by having newer, more secure and stable systems; it makes them money by streamlining business operations and letting their staff excel at what they do best; furthermore it ensures they avoid the significant cost of doing nothing.
Alongside the Law Society we firmly believe that Digital Transformation is the future of your business, and it needs to be holistic, considered, communicated and delivered. Consistently.
