UK top 60 law firm Brodies has selected Aderant Expert, swapping out its soon to be sunsetted Thomson Reuters Elite Enterprise practice management system. Brodies was the first UK client to go live on Elite’s Business Development Premier integral CRM solution, which it will continue to use.
Brodies, Scotland’s largest law firm, conducted what finance director David Edwards (pictured) describes as a desktop assessment of all the leading practice management systems before receiving demonstrations from “a shortlist” which inevitably included Elite 3E and Aderant. He would not be drawn on which other PMS vendors, if any, were on that shortlist.
With regard to why Aderant won, Edwards said: “There was no one single thing. I’m a bit old fashioned and these things come down to both systems and people and Aderant seemed that little bit better than the others.”
When asked how the selection will affect BDP he said: “This doesn’t affect our CRM solution and we will be sticking with that; this selection has no way impinged on the work we’ve done there and we’ll be capitalising on our investment.”
In a release out today (10 January) Edwards will say: “When we began to look for a new practice management system, we used it as an opportunity to rethink how we wished to operate in the future. We were impressed from the beginning with Aderant’s professional approach and excellent product. The team from Brodies embarked on a wide-ranging due diligence exercise to ensure Aderant ticked all the boxes. It did.”
This is another big UK top 60 win for Aderant, which won Travers Smith and Freeths in 2018. Aderant was a Timeslice swapout and Freeths formerly used Lexis Axxia.
However, among the most recent PMS selection processes at UK top 50 Elite Enterprise clients, the decision has largely gone in Elite’s favour: DAC Beachcroft and Howard Kennedy both last year elected to switch to 3E. In 2016, Enterprise client Stephenson Harwood selected Aderant, and there are a large number of Enterprise sites out to tender over the next year.
Aderant’s clients in the UK top 30 include Clifford Chance, Herbert Smith Freehills, Pinsent Masons, Bird & Bird, Taylor Wessing and Wragge Lawrence Graham, which at the start of 2016 became Gowling WLG.
