Elite Vantage in London kicks off in earnest today (12 May) with a heavy focus on customer testimonies of moving to the cloud and on data strategy.
Speaking ahead of the conference to Legal IT Insider, chief product officer Elisabet Hardy reminded us that this is the third Vantage since Elite became an independent company, following its sale by Thomson Reuters.
“I think about the platform, how firms are operating and how much has changed,” reflects Hardy. “We didn’t have AI the same way three years ago, like we do today. We were still talking about what would it be to operate in a SaaS platform in the cloud and educating customers, and this year we have so many of the largest law firms and leaders up on stage talking alongside with us, which I think is a real proof point of how far, not just Elite, but Elite together with our customers have come.”
Practice management is an area where many law firms are still struggling to move their operations to the cloud and at Vantage, Hardy says there will be a heavy emphasis on hearing from customers who are midway through or have completed that journey. Elite will reveal that their largest customers have reduced days sales outstanding by 10%.
Hardy says: “We have Kirkland & Ellis up on stage, the largest firm in the world, talking about going to our SaaS platform and doing a project in about eight months to go live, which wouldn’t even have been a thought three years ago.”
Kirkland’s target is to be live by the end of the year and Hardy says: “I think what people will hear [CFO turned executive advisor] Chris Cooley say today is you have to just decide that you’re going to do it and go all in and be, from a leadership perspective, understanding that this is a priority and we are going to staff it as a priority. We are going to make sure that we are aligned in the goals that we’re trying to achieve in the project. And we are going to try to get there as fast as possible because no one wants to be in a project for an extended period of time.
“The value really comes into play once you are live on the platform. And I think that Chris will also share that the way that we work with our firms today has evolved, as you would expect over the last several years, where the lift isn’t as heavy as people think once they get into it.”
Hardy says that the challenge is that firms think that moving to the cloud is a bigger project than it is. “I’m not saying it’s a small project, but they think it’s a bigger, more complex project before they start it. And then when they get into it, they’re like, ‘Oh, okay, this isn’t so complicated. Okay, this is pretty straightforward. We’re going to get a lot of expertise help along the way from both Elite or Elite’s Premier delivery partners.’”
Kirkland, which is using Harbor, initially scheduled the Elite roll out as a two-year project and Hardy says: “Most of our customers are speeding up once they’ve started.”
Other customers speaking at Vantage include Clyde & Co, Kennedys and DWF. They will be talking about how they are using the software in the cloud, how far they have come with embedding AI, and they will be spending a lot of time talking about data. Cooley will be talking about Kirkland’s data strategy, which includes migrating across all their data using Elite’s private data lake offering and Data Connect.
“The AI conversation is quickly turning into data conversation,” says Hardy. “Because without data in a good place, in terms of your data strategy, AI just is not as effective as it can be. And that’s precisely why we released our Data Connect product, which is built using Microsoft Fabric.”
Data Connect is Elite’s recently-released unified data foundation that delivers governed 3E data directly into Microsoft Fabric alongside other firm systems. Today it reports that ten firms have adopted Data Connect, including two Am Law 200 firms. Some early adopters include Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP, Colin Biggers & Paisley, and Boodle Hatfield LLP. Hardy says that it means you can access financial data in “about as near real time as you can get.”
Firms are looking at using Copilot or Claude on top as a way of getting interrogating their financial data, and Elite is applying analytics and AI to feed data back in context inside of workflows within 3E and eBilling hub. “That’s where I think the real magic starts to happen, because now you can imagine having certain types of metrics refreshed real time when an end user is taking an action,” says Hardy.
Elite’s customers and prospects all know the necessary direction travel in terms of cloud, data and AI. Elite will be working hard at Vantage to show them that the time is now.
