With Thomson Reuters Elite now in the throes of disengaging itself from it Engage legal process management application (see timescale below) one of the first challengers coming out of the corner of the ring is Prosperoware with its Umbria software. “At Prosperoware, we are excited for the opportunity to serve Elite Engage customers and to provide them with alternative LPM technology,” says Keith Lipman, president and co-founder. “In fact, if they would like to switch to our Umbria enterprise software immediately, we would be happy to offer them incentives to make that happen.” Any interested firms can contact the company here: http://www.prosperoware.com/contact-us
TIMESCALE: Thomson Reuters Elite will end regular updates for Engage from January 2015, with the platform going into maintenance mode but with a commitment to continue support until December 2017, including bug fixes. The final update, due anytime now, is Engage 1.18 SP2 which supplies a systems update for budgeting and adds security features. It follows the release of v1.18 in August.
COMMENT: It’s deja vu all over again with Elite. About 10 years ago, the company went through an expansion phase acquiring the consultancies Hildebrandt and Baker Robbins, plus XMLaw, the latter being wrapped up in the Thomson Reuters Hubbard One business. Then, one by one the pieces were all discarded or rolled into other divisions, with Engage – once described as being “a potential legal killer app in the brave new world of alternative fee arrangements” – being one of the final relics of the Hildebrandt Baker Robbins “experiment” to go to the wall. Elite is now pretty much back where it started, focussing on its core Enterprise and 3E time and billing/PMS business, with an emphasis on getting more sites off Enterprise and onto Elite 3E.