Leading global law firm Clyde & Co will be moving its core financial and practice management systems to the cloud with Elite 3E, with Harbor as its implementation partner, we can reveal.
Founded in 1933, Clyde & Co has more than 3,200 legal professionals—including 492 partners and more than 2,700 lawyers—working across 60+ offices on 6 continents. It has been an on-prem 3E customer since 2016, and before that an Enterprise customer for more than two decades.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider about the selection process, Clyde & Co’s head of IT strategy, architecture and design, Jeremy Morris, said: “We wanted a SaaS solution, that’s driven by an IT strategy that is cloud-first and the desire to reduce out of our data centre footprint.”
He added: “The fact that Elite has rewritten the software and done the architecture work was important to us.”
3E in Azure will underpin Clyde & Co’s firm wide transformation efforts, providing API integrations with other systems and tools across the firm. Clyde & Co has an overarching Microsoft strategy and will be taking advantage of 3E’s connectivity with the Microsoft Power Platform and Morris said: “Elite’s openness to the Microsoft stack and working with Power Apps was an important factor in the selection decision.”
The transformation project will also be supported by the deployment of 3E Data Insights, providing analytics and real-time dashboards which can incorporate data from third-party sources and solutions.
A lot of the immediate focus will be on migrating to the cloud and Elite’s vice president of sales, Duncan Hannigan, said: “There’s a balance between doing business transformation before the cloud and when you’re in the cloud. Clyde & Co are focused on getting to the cloud with simplification and thinking strategically about what makes sense to bring to the cloud – you don’t take dusty boxes to a new house and there is a simplification program that we are supporting. The benefit of getting to the cloud quickly and the associated services and fully supported management services and technology available to them is more important than trying to boil the ocean with new ways of working.”
He added: “The main difference is that now when you move to the cloud it’s not one and done any more, it’s just the starting point and there is a fairly steady pace of evolution.”
Elite now offers customers data lake options that hold unstructured and structured data, allowing a faster time to deployment and the opportunity to better leverage AI.
Over 25% of Elite’s customers are now signed up to 3E in the cloud, including a number of very large firms. Hannigan said: “There is no difference in the pace and desire for change between a massive firm and a single office one. Everyone we’re talking to is saying ‘when’ not ‘if’.”
Clyde & Co says it will be evolving and enhancing its billing processes through expanded use of eBillingHub, and 3E Proforma.