By Legal Futures’ Associate DPS Software [1]
William Heelis met Beatrix Potter (the Children’s author) when she visited his office looking for legal advice over a property purchase. They soon married, and the firm founded by William, Temple Heelis solicitors has now been established for almost 200 years.
[2]With offices in some of the most beautiful parts of the UK across the Lake District this legal business knows that adopting the best technology is a key part of the foundations of any law firm.
As a business they had already adopted hosting technology and their data and software had been in the cloud for over 6 years. They were looking for a solution and more to the point a solution provider that would be a ‘proper partner’ providing advice and software to help guide them through the next phases of their expansion and deliver greater efficiencies.
They had a shopping list of needs that included a
- ‘Holistic solution’
- Need to work with someone not buy something
- Software and service with a proper road map
- No one wants to buy a software package and service for today, where is the partner we are investing in going to be in 5, 10 years’ time?
- Comprehensive conversion of their existing database
- Need to move legacy data
- ‘One’ database, One databank, One system solution where case and accounts don’t only meet and live happily ever after, they are twins that were born and grew up together!
- Enough of ‘integrated’ solutions. Need a proper complete solution, ‘twins not friends’
- Fully browser-based solution
- At some stage it’s all going to be browser based, are we there yet? Is the partner making the proper investment to get there?
- Proper client portal
- What will clients see, will they see a progressive and modern law firm that happens to be 200 years old?
Having said all this moving software provider and cloud provider at the same time is no easy task. There is a lot of change management involved and the supplier and client need to work well together to ensure the smoothest transition.
Jamie Hamilton, Managing Partner, Temple Heelis solicitors
Jamie Hamilton, Managing Partner and Head of private client services said, “we were looking for a partner that could work effectively to move us to a far slicker technology. When we met Kunwar from DPS the striking thing was the openness of the solution. We could literally tailor it to our needs. The go live phase was always going to be a nervy affair for us all but I’m now not sure what we were nervous about!”
Kunwar Chohan, Senior Software investment consultant at DPS said, “I was on site for the go live day and it was a pleasure to see all the staff in the office I was at embracing the changes. They were all enjoying the challenge of the new software and reaping the efficiency benefits”
Scott Ridley, Technical Director at DPS software said, “We welcome Temple Heelis on board and look forward to a long working relationship with them. It is always fantastic when the team all work so well together to produce the right result for our clients. We know this site had challenges around the data transfer but the migration team here pulled out all the stops and got a great result for all of us”.