Harbor this week announced the expansion of its managed services for law firms, focusing on major strategic applications from technology vendors such as Elite, Intapp and iManage. Its managed services for strategic applications are an expansion of services previously offered by Pinnacle, acquired by Harbor in February 2024, which long had the ambition to be a single go-to technology partner supporting law firms across various product lines.
The managed services address four key areas: 1) business-as-usual support including fault resolution; 2) proactive guidance around system and data integrity and maintenance; 3) continuous improvement with enhancements, upgrades, workflows, and testing; and 4) strategic advice on issues such as integrations across cloud and on-premises systems.
“Recruiting and developing enterprise application specialists is a challenge, particularly when it comes to supporting law firm business applications. Whether their systems are in the cloud or on-premises, maintaining a high level of service for lawyers, finance, risk, and operations teams is critical,” said Justin Farmer, practice group lead for legal technology + operations, Harbor. “Harbor serves as an extension of internal IT and business systems teams, taking on applications support and providing access to applications experts to unlock new value from their strategic business systems.”
Pinnacle in 2023 hired Gareth Thomas from Intapp with a view to accelerating and widening its managed services program.
Harbor also this week published a case study of work done with UK law firm Trowers & Hamlins, which is a longstanding Pinnacle customer. Trowers is using Harbor for both Elite 3E and Intapp applications.
“Having recently joined Trowers & Hamlins, it has been encouraging to see how Harbor’s managed services teams have been supporting the firm with the day-to-day running of everything Elite and Intapp,” said Andrew Foster, finance systems manager at Trowers & Hamlins. “Having Harbor’s expert resources there and available has provided a great degree of reassurance that when issues become complex or challenging, we have a partner who understands the applications as well as the firm. The collaboration means that we can operate effectively without having to resource all that specialist knowledge internally, as the firm continues to develop and grow in accordance with our strategic plan.”
The announcement follow Elite’s launch this year of a Premier Delivery Partners Program, which will enable customers to work directly with select services partners – so far Harbor and Helm360 – on end-to-end implementations of 3E cloud.