Fast-growing full-service US law firm Chartwell Law will shortly publish a case study revealing that it has selected and gone live on Aderant Expert, having risen from a boutique law firm to one of the National Law Journal’s 250 largest firms.
Chartwell, which has around 170 remote working attorneys, began evaluating practice management systems in 2019 and selected Aderant Expert later that year. It cites Expert’s relational SQL database as a key factor in their decision.
The firm hired experienced technology leader Maor Levy as its chief technology officer in March 2020. Levy began collaborating with Aderant to develop a personalized implementation process. However, only two weeks after Levy joined the firm, the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
With operational efficiency more of a requisite than ever, Levy says he was determined to push forward with implementation plans despite the pandemic. Aderant took the lead in beginning the migration process by extracting the firm’s financial data from their existing database and transferring it into a relational SQL database, incorporating a rigorous testing process.
Next, the Aderant team configured and customised Expert to address Chartwell’s short-term and longer-term needs.
The last stage was to map the data from the previous solution into Expert. The Aderant team collaborated with Levy to ensure that he was familiarized with the SQL database and handled troubleshooting with the older hardware and operating systems that the previous solution had relied on.
The entire migration process took one year to complete, with the pandemic causing only an initial slowdown at its onset.
Levy said: “Expert saves hours, even days, for our accounting department. Now, we produce prebills at the beginning of every month, which took up to four days under our previous PMS. With Expert, one member of our staff can accomplish the same work within two hours, completing the prebill process electronically, so that our lawyers no longer print bills and annotate paper documents. We love that Expert automatically sends out invoices, that accounting can easily produce complex reports for lawyers, and that lawyers have their own access to information whenever they want it.”