Shearman & Sterling has become the first Am Law 50 law firm to move to the Thomson Reuters Elite 3E Cloud, with the project already underway and expected to be completed in 2024, we can reveal.
Shearman originally went out for tender to replace its sunsetted Thomson Reuters Elite Enterprise practice management system in 2018/19, selecting Elite 3E on premises after evaluating systems including Aderant Expert and SAP. However, the project was set back by Covid-19, during which time Thomson Reuters further developed its cloud offering, to the point that Shearman pivoted in its selection decision this year.
The selection of 3E cloud, which follows Shearman’s master data management programme ‘Shearman Analytics’ and the roll out of iManage Cloud in 2020, is sponsored by global chief technology officer Lawrence Baxter, chief knowledge and client value officer Meredith Williams-Range, and chief financial officer Jim Burke. Also heavily involved in the execution of the project are global director of enterprise architecture and delivery services, Jeff Saper, and global director of knowledge and research, Glenn La Force.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider about the unusually fortuitous delay caused by Covid, Williams-Range said: “We paused the implementation, by which point Thomson Reuters came back and said, ‘We’re ready now.’”
Saper, added: “A few years ago, when Thomson Reuters said, ‘We have a cloud solution’, we said respectfully ‘no you don’t.’ But now it is SaaS, and it is morphing.”
3E Cloud is built on Microsoft Azure and Saper says: “The application runs on Microsoft, and we have had conversations with Microsoft to make sure they are supporting them on the back end, and we continue to have numerous architectural discussions to this day on how they’re applying security. On how they’re applying the integrations. On what they are using for integrations.”
He adds: “Their development and architecture makes sense. We went through a lot of the architectural understanding and the schematics of how and where things are; the hubs and where the data sits; what tools they’re using from a reporting standpoint; what tools we need to use which are complementary to what we’re already doing on the BI side of things, for instance with BigSquare; and how the data sits and where the data sits. It’s not just your standard SQL database on the back end, it is cloud.”
With regard to often problematic automatic software updates, Shearman has created a test environment and Saper says: “We have a test environment so that we can test our integrations to make sure the integrations don’t break when we apply them to production. That’s a process that we demanded as part of the contract negotiations.”
ILTA’s 2022 Technology Survey shows that adoption of cloud practice management systems is still low, with an average of just 12% of law firms saying they use a cloud PMS now, or will do within the next 12 months. While the technology is developing, much of the fear surrounds the potential impact of moving to the cloud on what is often referred to as the spaghetti junction of systems in operation within a law firm. However, La Force told Legal IT Insider: “What you refer to as the spaghetti junction is what we have been unwinding the whole time. As part of the Shearman Analytics program, we looked at how the systems were all intertwined and moved to a hub and spoke model. Our master data management strategy is centred around a data lake that pulls from each system so data can flow between them. That way they are not all intertwined together where if one thing breaks there isn’t a cascading effect causing issues in multiple systems of record.”
There has also traditionally been an issue around lack of standardisation in billing practices, and it is interesting to note that Shearman’s selection of 3E Cloud follows what Williams-Range calls a multiyear journey of data and process standardisation. She told Legal IT Insider: “I’ve been a lawyer for 20 years, the way we bill and collect is not bespoke. When it comes to billing and collections and time entry, if you raise that up to the highest level of what we do, it’s the same at every professional services organisation. You bill your time, it goes out into an invoice processing, it goes out in a bill, it comes back in a collection, and we have general ledgers.
“Do we have certain things that are maybe a unique field that we have to have because of the way we might need to calculate something, yes, but what we’ve done in our multi year journey is data and process standardisation. The process was not comparing law firm one to law firm two, but comparing our processes to how a company, a large billion-dollar company should work and what are the processes that we should have in our different systems.”
She adds: “We call it a Gartner approach to how we manage things now. It’s not how does a law firm run, but how does a company run and utilising the best practises because that that’s the only way we’re going to get better.”
Don’t miss our more in-depth interview about Shearman’s selection of 3E Cloud within the context of its wider transformation journey – including observations from Lawrence Baxter over how it has overcome the issue of approaching clients – out soon.