Updated 11 September to clarify the role of Lights-On Consulting
Fast-growing private equity backed legal services group Lawfront has selected ShareDo as its new case management system and is building a practice management system on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, with ShareDo providing the legal accounting functionality and workflow around it.
Lawfront, set up in 2023 and funded by Blixt Group, has acquired four law firms to date with a combined revenue of £70m. Its strategy is to make further acquisitions, hit a target of £150m, and sit within the UK Top 50. The firms it has acquired so far are Farleys, Fisher Jones Greenwood, Nelsons, and Slater Heelis. The Lawfront Platform is being built for all current and future firms across the group.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Lawfront’s COO Axel Koelsch, who has a long COO pedigree in large law firms, said: “For me what this is about is taking the workflow, no-code way of thinking and applying that to everything which isn’t in the classic accounting world. What I’ve seen of accounting systems is that they are relatively static, and they come from a stock point of view. They are built on maintaining an accounting structure rather versus the workflow point of view and what people need to do to complete their work. What we wanted to do is base the structure on how people move through the matter and what they do every day and build around that. It’s not an accounting system with workflow bolted on.”
The new system will be rolled out to the first Lawfront firm in April next year and Koelsch said: “We’re using NetDocuments for document management but everything else is in ShareDo.”
The four firms currently in the Lawfront group have designed the workflow for each of the practices. Koelsch said: “ShareDo is building the workflow the way it is supposed to be.”
He added: “The overarching case is simple: every firm we speak to has a different PMS and everyone hates it because it’s not secure, doesn’t integrate with other systems and is becoming expensive to maintain. Legacy providers are racking up the fees because there is no-one to hold them to account. We say that makes no sense.”
The new Lawfront system will be run by Peter Carr, IT partner at Fisher Jones Greenwood, and Garth Vladislavic, a director at technology consultancy Evolve Technologies. The legal technology consultancy charged with validating the methodology of the selection process and project set up is Lights-On Consulting.
The project is a significant investment and Koelsch, who has previously held COO roles at Linklaters Germany, Hogan Lovells Continental Europe, Freshfields DACEE, Addleshaw Goddard (global) and Stephenson Harwood (global), said that being outside of a traditional partnership model means Lawfront can invest heavily in technology, commenting: “In a normal partnership you can’t just borrow £3m but that is what we’re doing. We are regional leaders with national scale and that is the advantage that we are building on.”
The Lawfront Platform will be watched with great interest across the legal market. Dynamics 365 Business Central is rebranded Dynamics NAV. It brings with it the option of AI-powered assistant Copilot.
The history of Dynamics 365 legal finance systems tells us that their development is complex and not without risk. LexisNexis exited the PMS market in 2019 with the sale of LexisOne to sa.global, with customers Wedlake Bell and Collas Crill subsequently moving to Aderant and Elite respectively, albeit Fieldfisher and Webber Wentzel remain customers. Simmons & Simmons engaged Avanade to replace its PMS and HR systems with an on prem Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP Solution but is moving to Elite 3E (for finance). Peppermint Technology, which is making great headway globally with its Dynamics 365 CRM system, has gained little visible traction with PMS.
On the flip side, we are entering a new era in which law firms are gravitating towards cloud-based practice management systems and living in a Microsoft 365 world. We’re told that sa.global’s new European reseller Aevelon already has a number of active engagements. In Europe, there is a growing number of Dynamics 365 PMS options for law firms. In Denmark, tech consultancies Norriq and Abakion have built legal ERPs based on Business Central. We also understand that there is a top five Netherlands law firm working on implementing a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Business Operations system. Typically, Business Central is seen as a good choice for small and medium-sized businesses with fairly simple needs, while Finance and Operations suits larger enterprises with more complex needs.
ShareDo’s platform and the team behind it including founder Ben Nicholson is widely admired and the team at Lawfront are not afraid of making waves. Built well, it will be a compelling story. The devil, as always, is in the fine tuning, and it has to be able to be able to handle complex billing.
caroline@legaltechnology.com