Learning to fly with the legal eagles
Selling to solicitors and law firms provides some good opportunities for resellers, but it requires patience and an in-depth understanding of their structure and ways of working, reports Ken Young
“Selling to law firms is an absolute nightmare,” according to a former sales executive who preferred to remain anonymous. “The problem is many firms have no timeline. The decision process can take a few days or a few years. You just never know.”
His comments are typical of many who have had experience of selling into law firms and solicitors’ offices, a sector typified by age-old tradition and caution about new technology.
It is a sector seen by many as divided into two broad categories: firms that are increasingly professional and run on modern business lines, and those run on traditional lines that stifle innovation.
There are about 9,000 law firms in the UK. But the lion’s share of spending is by five huge firms known as the ‘Magic Circle’, followed by 90 or so firms with between 500 and 800 staff. The largest UK firm, Clifford Chance, had a turnover of £915m last year, with profits per partner of £644,000. But IT spending has been modest, with turnover year on year largely flat an an emphasis on cost-cutting to improve profitability.
The sector is traditionally conservative and mindful of following its own market leaders. Among other things, this means firms tend to favour one or two vendors in each application area: for example, Hummingbird and Interwoven for document management; Verity and Autonomy for search; Interaction for CRM; and Aderant (formerly Solution 6) and Elite for practice management. Yet the sector is going through something of a quiet revolution.
There has been a drift towards more formal corporate structures that have professionalised the role of IT directors and increased the need for efficient IT systems, giving more opportunities to IT resellers that understand the needs of the sector. There are no sector-specific trends in relation to hardware vendor choice. All the leading brands have sold into the top 100 law firms.
Learning to fly with the legal eagles
Selling to solicitors and law firms provides some good opportunities for resellers, but it requires patience and an in-depth understanding of their structure and ways of working, reports Ken Young
The professionalisation of law firms is giving global vendors a greater opportunity to break into what is a fairly closed market.
One example of this is the approach to practice management of the major law firms, perhaps most evident in the choice of SAP by Linklaters. It is reputed to have spent more than £12m on an installation spanning its global empire. The trend for firms to select global vendors is also evident in document management, with Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and EMC (with Documentum), challenging Interwoven and Hummingbird for a share of the cake.
Ironically, law firms depend more than many businesses on making their operations electronic, yet they are some of the slowest when it comes to innovation. Much of their IT spending matches that of offices of similar size, but there are also areas specific to the sector. They include practice management, document management, online text services, CRM, and mobile solutions.
In addition, law firms are heavy users of data storage and archive solutions because of concerns about compliance and security. They are also increasingly heavy users of technology that improves their ability to communicate with clients and process invoices. Billing systems are an ever-present concern, as are intranets, and extranets for allowing clients to follow the progress of cases.
The importance of spending time with clients while attending to other business has also made UK law firms the fastest-growing users of mobile devices, with thousands of BlackBerry users happily keeping up with their email during client meetings.
As in most sectors which depend on intellectual property, there is a heavy and almost obsessive reliance on email and document management, providing a natural entry point for those selling archiving, storage and security. Paul Grossman, sales director at email archiving specialist Cryoserver, said: “We have found many law firms are having trouble integrating email into document management systems. They also have to be increasingly careful about data protection and compliance. Many are not doing enough to ensure that archived emails are not corrupted.”
Cryoserver works through Tikit, the largest IT solutions provider serving the UK legal sector. Grossman reported that, not surprisingly, small firms are in most need of innovation.
“I have seen firms constantly printing out emails and adding them to files, where they have matter held in a variety of formats: print, CDs and database. It’s hopeless for the fee-earners. What they need is one button that retrieves all relevant files,” he said.
The holy grail for law firms is the complete ‘matter-centric’ view, bringing together all electronic files and data pertaining to a ‘matter’, or case, including financial data, time records, documents, images, emails and so on.
Resellers would clearly be wise to work out how they fit into such needs before venturing into the sector. For hardware resellers, it is a matter of ensuring they can provide and support systems that meet the needs of networking, copying and scanning, to allow all paper documents to be transferred to data management databases.
Microsoft’s customers in the legal sector include Clifford Chance, Eversheds, Freshfield Bruckhaus Deringer, Linklaters and Lovells. It also has partnerships with many resellers in the sector, including Trinity, Lynx, Computacenter and Hewlett-Packard.
Simon Shaw, legal corporate business manager at Microsoft, believes the key focus for law firms is their intellectual property. “A law firm’s selling point is typically its intellectual property, so the better the resources available to protect and efficiently manage it, the easier it is for the firm to retain its competitive advantage,” he said.
“Firms are also concerned about security and flexible working, giving staff access to information at any time, from any location and on any device.”
But he warns resellers to make sure they know the sector well. “Customers will, almost without exception, expect IT resellers to come bearing legal knowledge, not just technological expertise. Resellers will generally receive a warmer welcome if they can turn up and demonstrate a keen awareness of best practice, and how to use IT to achieve that, rather than a features and functionality list.”
He added that many law firms have IT departments with considerable experience and users who make huge demands on applications. “Many law firms rely upon simple functions like word processing and email/time management tools as mission-critical applications. Customers in this space typically use a huge range of the features in these products,” he said.
Notably, this means significant use of word processing and email systems, leading to concerns about privacy and integrity of data. This is a niche targeted by firms such as Workshare. It has sold its Deltaview document tracking software into Magic Circle firm Clifford Chance, which also uses it to integrate its document management and email systems.
George Korchinsky, executive vice-president at Workshare, said: “Law firms find the manual comparison of documents very difficult, so a product like this lays out the changes in a format that is very easy to view. We are also well integrated with Microsoft and its SharePoint product to make it easier to create the infrastructure they need. There is a significant market for what we call document integrity.”
But the bigger picture for law firms seems to be one of how they use technology to set themselves apart from other firms. According to Gerard Neiditsch, executive director of business integration and technology at law firm Mallesons Stephen Jaques, firms are facing a future in which their customers are in a strong buying position thanks to the choice available. This is leading them to put pressure on IT directors to come up with value-added services that give them an edge over competitors as well as bind customers to their services.
Learning to fly with the legal eagles
Selling to solicitors and law firms provides some good opportunities for resellers, but it requires patience and an in-depth understanding of their structure and ways of working, reports Ken Young
Des Lekerman, managing director of Eurodata Systems, which supplied remote access for law firm Herbert Smith’s partners, said: “Law firms are turning to IT to deliver better services to clients, and as a result access to applications becomes a strategic issue. These firms are all about providing professional services, so the key is proving that you can help them deliver those services and then getting your name known in the sector.”
But resellers may also find that law firms are wise to unnecessary upselling because they are so well networked and constantly study each other’s good practice. For example, when asked about Addlesham Booth’s printing strategy, Damien Griffiths, IT director at the law firm, said the aims of the vendor and the firm may not always be in synch.
“They often want to sell larger and more powerful devices such as the new range of top-end multifunction devices. But we like to keep a good ratio of printers per fee-earner because they don’t want to have to walk miles to find a printer, so there can be a conflict there,” he said.
So can newcomers get into the legal sector easily? “Not if they don’t understand it well,” said Charles Christian, editor of industry bible Legal Technology Insider. “You are dealing with ‘clients’, ‘matters’ and ‘partners’, not limited companies. I have seen many vendors and resellers enter this space and beat a hasty retreat a year or two later because they didn’t have the funds to last the distance. Buying decisions are usually made at quarterly partner meetings and it can take 18 months to two years for a decision to get through. Some firms just run out of budget before then.”
According to Christian, most large vendors now adopt a more hands-off approach, working through smaller niche players to gain leverage. “The market is just too small for them to be able to make an impact, but they can support sales where it is profitable. On the hardware front it is not different from any other sector with all the big names jostling for market share.”
But with smartphones spreading like wildfire through the legal profession, there is little doubt that funds are available if a technology can be proved to save a fee-earner time. Bearing in mind that in a top firm such as Linklaters the profits per partner are £834,000, most firms will do anything to enable partners to be more efficient and increase those all-important billable hours.
Contacts
Cryoserver (020) 7251 1000
Eurodata Systems (020) 7619 1500
www.eurodatasystems.com
Microsoft (0870) 60 10 100
www.microsoft .co.uk
Tikit (020) 7400 3737
Workshare (020) 7426 000