Ready Made Practice Software or a Custom Build for Your Firm

Most products cover the same core. Matter opening, conflict checks, time entry, invoices, document storage, a court or filing diary and a client portal. If that describes your week, you gain years of tested behaviour by buying. Vendors have also met your problems before, so their conflict check screens, trust accounting rules and e-filing connections have usually been tested by hundreds of firms before yours.

Ready products also carry updates, support and a user community. A new partner may have used the same tool at a previous firm.

Start by writing down what the firm does that is ordinary. You may find that most of it is. Be honest about habits too, because a firm that will not change how it opens matters will fight any product.

Trouble starts at the edges. Always. A patent practice tracks priority dates, national phase deadlines in many countries, annuity payments and foreign associate instructions. A generic diary treats these as plain dates and loses the rules between them. Annuity reminders for each jurisdiction, assignment recordals and the instruction chain to a foreign associate all hang from one family of dates, and a generic diary cannot link them.

Multi branch firms face another strain. One filing may pass through three offices, each with its own approver and cost centre. Products built around one office force staff into spreadsheets again. A branch in each city may also file in a different court, with its own fee schedule, clerk and form.

Count workarounds. If staff keep a side sheet for the same task every week, the product is not fitting that task. Workarounds hide cost, because the time spent re-keying a docket sheet never appears on any invoice.

Ask vendors to demonstrate your hardest matter, not their best one. Use real names for fields and real documents. Watch how many clicks and how many exports it takes. Bring the partner who dislikes software to the demonstration, because that person will find the screen where the hardest case stalls.

Test the exit door too. Can you export matters, documents and ledgers in open formats such as CSV and PDF? A product that traps records is expensive to leave. Ask whether the vendor’s own staff can move your documents, matter history and billing ledger, or whether you must pay a separate consultant to do it.

Ask who pays for change. A ready product changes when the vendor decides. A custom build changes when you ask.

A custom build means decisions. Someone at the firm must describe each step, approve screens and test with real files. Expect months of that attention. Plan a pilot with one practice group, a data migration from the old system and a month of running both side by side before the old files close.

It also means running software after launch. Hosting, backups, security patches and a person to call when it fails. Budget for this before the first line is written.

The middle path is often best. Buy a product for matters and billing, then build only the docketing module or filing tracker that makes the firm different.

List your ten most repeated tasks. Keep it short. Mark each as ordinary, bent by a workaround or impossible. If most are ordinary, buy. If your revenue depends on an impossible one, build that piece. Write the answer for each task in one word, so that the partners can see at a glance where the product fits and where it fails.

Run a short trial of a ready product with two real matters. Note every workaround.

Bring that list to the next partners’ meeting and decide on evidence, not on a demo. Then ask each vendor to quote against that same list.