The legal and accountancy services firm HCB Group (HCB) has just signed a three year, six-figure deal to deploy ALB from Advanced Legal across its nationwide network of offices. The fully integrated practice and case management system (PCMS), designed to help legal firms efficiently manage their clients, cases and documents, will go live early next year and will be used in more than 20 offices. HCB Group has been formed through mergers and acquisitions of law firms including Widdows Mason and Park Woodfine. The firm is replacing its existing solutions with a unified system, enabling a more cohesive and consistent approach to working across all practices to be maintained. The deal gives HCB access to ALB’s full workflow suite for automating processes and expansion modules such as Marketing and Credit Control, to further help the firm implement its strategy.
Mike Gahan, CEO of HCB Group, said “We wanted to adopt consistent processes across the different practices, improve customer management and further enhance business performance. ALB offers us everything we need and the full integration of ’practice elements’ such as matter management, accounting and marketing into one package is a real advantage for any firm looking for the complete solution.”
In conjunction with ALB, the firm will be adopting OverVu, Advanced’s dashboard and KPI reporting suite to deliver management reporting and KPI metrics to the business. Gahan continues “ALB and OverVu fit perfectly – the seamless integration between the two products will give fee earners, departments and individual offices visibility of their performance at a glance. That knowledge can instantly help us to become more responsive as we can act on management information in real-time.”
ALSO
Advanced Legal has entered an official partnership agreement with specialist IT disaster recovery provider Plan B. The partnership will enable Advanced to offer legal firms disaster recovery of their IT servers in less than one hour, the fastest recovery time available from any cloud service provider world-wide.
Advanced’s partnership with Plan B is designed to help solicitors to effectively manage risk in accordance with the Solicitors Regulation Authority regulations, which require firms to operate in accordance with proper governance and sound financial and risk management principles. Plan B enables firms to identify and manage risks to business continuity caused by any IT failures or damage to offices ensuring the firm can continue to run efficiently in the event of a disaster. Plan B’s pre-recovery solution has been rated as excellent by ZDNet and is recommended by PC PRO.
The disaster recovery provider specialises in protecting IT servers and enables businesses to fully recover all servers in approximately 15 to 45 minutes, meaning employees can be up and running quickly, in the event of an emergency. It is the only disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) provider that can offer a pre-recovery service, where IT systems are fully recovered and tested in advance which is the only way to guarantee 100% success of a full recovery. The pre-recovery process is also automated, reducing the risk of error and making the service much more cost effective and easy to use.
Advanced will offer the solution both to its on-premise and cloud based customers. The partnership will be a benefit for customers that need strong business continuity plans but may not be able to afford more expensive disaster recovery options. Doug Hargrove, Managing Director, Advanced Legal says: “The partnership with Plan B will enhance Advanced’s portfolio and support our “single supplier” ethos allowing us to deliver a fast, automated and affordable disaster recovery service to our customers. With more and more documents and data being stored digitally it is vital that firms ensure their data is secure and retrievable. A completely reliable disaster recovery time is vital, not just to ensure firms can minimise the number of hours lost in the face of a disaster, but so that their clients can have complete confidence their data and documents are safe and secure.”
COMMENT: Advanced recently celebrated its 300th ALB client and saw a further 17 firms sign-up for the solution during April, May and June 2014. Incidentally, Plan B reckon the average midsized company has 16-20 hours of network, system or application downtime per year. (Only 16 hours ..Ed) Customers looking to justify the cost of business continuity will have access to the Plan B calculator to calculate how much downtime will cost them per outage or per annum.