Fulcrum Global Technologies has built West Coast employment firm Bradford & Barthel a customised eBilling solution in place of Thomson Reuters’ eBillingHub, after the firm says it was left with no developers following Thomson Reuters’ (TR’s) closure of eBillingHub’s headquarters in Pittsburgh as part of its widescale restructuring programme.
Bradford & Barthel in July last year signed to swap out Aderant for Fulcrum Snap, which is Fulcrum’s integrated business suite incorporating new business intake; time management; matter management; billing, finance and practice management; and analytics solution Snap Insights.
The project began on 1 August and it was ready to go live in October. However, it has subsequently emerged that go-live had to be pushed back after the firm discovered that eBillingHub’s developers had been let go and were not available to build a bridge to the new system.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, CTO Eric Hunter, who was formerly directly of knowledge but promoted to CTO in January, said: “I said to Ahmed ‘let’s work out what’s happening but I suspect that you’re to have to build a custom interface because I get the impression that Thomson Reuters can’t build the bridge.’
“I realised that because of the redundancies in Pittsburgh there was no-one to help us and I thought, ‘Holy cow, we need it now!’ We agreed to push back go-live and Fulcrum built an entirely new custom interface and also a mobile time entry solution and web-based time entry customisations due in phase two.”
The new go-live date is in March, after the firm’s year end.
Fulcrum Snap replaces Aderant’s financial services, web-based On the Go Time entry and billing solutions as well as Tableau’s dashboard and reporting. Hunter said: “Visual analytics and dashboarding are built in.”
He added: “We’ve wanted a financial cloud system for years and have looked at solutions in and out of legal, but it wasn’t until we partnered with Ahmed and went with Fulcrum as a technology partner that we felt comfortable. We have an environment with Google and Amazon, we felt this was a very comfortable fit.”
Despite being in place at firms including Linklaters, Baker McKenzie, Norton Rose Fulbright and Shoosmiths, SAP is still regarded with apprehension by many law firms and most will tell you that SAP Fulcrum is wildly expensive. Hunter denies this, commenting: “The way that Fulcrum structures their pricing means that we are saving a ton of money. We were expecting ‘sticker shock’ but were surprised. When you’re in a position where you’re trying to work with a partner who understands the future of law you need to fix the price point at the right level.”
Following Hunter’s appointment as CTO, Bradford & Barthel has appointed Amir Riaby to the role of director of technology and innovation. Riaby was senior programme manager and was promoted to the new role in January.
Knowledge has been split off and is now headed by San Diego-based equity partner and now chief knowledge officer Alec Bradford.
It’s been a good couple of months for Fulcrum, which, as we first revealed on the Legal IT Insider website on 29 January, has won respected Wall Street firm Seward & Kissel as client.
The 160-attorney firm is swapping out Thomson Reuters’ Elite Enterprise for Fulcrum’s intake, conflicts, time, billing, finance, collection and expense modules.
Seward & Kissel made a decision to go with Fulcrum in October but didn’t finalise that until the end of December. The firm, which has offices in New York and Washington, is looking to go live in six months.
The selection process was necessitated by Elite’s announcement in 2016 that it is to sunset Enterprise.