Legal Application Software vs Software for Other Industries

I did a job at the start of the year that was a bit of fun. It was helping a listed company (small cap) select an ERP system to replace MYOB and a range of Excel spreadsheets that had evolved as the business had grown.

The company however was not a legal firm. Fundamentally they had a simple manufacturing process that recycled damaged oil feedstock into crude oil that could be used again. A fascinating business opportunity in today’s market in my view.

Now it had been many years since I had been involved with computer systems for distribution and manufacturing businesses but it all came back pretty easily. FIFO, bill of materials, inventory, picking lists, bill of lading, despatch, all terms that are completely foreign when working with a law firm’s systems. In the end a nice blast from the past but accounting is accounting and the process of making something and then selling it is not that hard, albeit MRP can stretch your brain at times.

In any case, my role was mainly to facilitate the selection process. Gather requirements, structure them in a manner that was understandable to vendors, liaise with the vendors regarding their responses to get to a shortlist for the client’s management team and then coordinating demonstrations with the client’s staff and assist negotiating the final contract.

We sent the RFI out to the major players: SAP, Sage, Pronto, Sun, Dynamics, NetSuite … and received details responses from all.

Well that’s great but why is all this relevant to a legal technology blog, I hear you ask. Well, for me it was interesting to see how the differences in approach that these systems are taking to generic system issues. Three items in particular were significant to me.

The first item was the user experience, or UX, as the term is now. Every single product that we looked at had a “dashboard” approach to the user interaction. This was role based and allowed different components to be presented depending upon that role. For example, a purchasing clerk has a different set of common tasks, reports and information requirements from a sales clerk or, indeed, a manager, or a Director. All of the systems allowed each role to have tailored task lists, information that was summarised at a higher and more manageable level but allowing drill down into the details as required. For managers, this included the graphical representation of information and the subsequent drill downs required, right down the specification transaction and GL journal lines if necessary.

From what I have seen of the legal products none have them have thought through the dashboard approach to the same level that these ERP systems have. I have to admit that I know Elite 3E espouses this approach but I haven’t had a lot of personal experience with the product but from what I have heard from our staff with hands on experience, it’s not that easy to do. At least the thinking is there though.

Overall the approach that has been taken with all systems that we looked at is simple, elegant and intuitive. I have grabbed two screen shots from one of the products below to show the approach. I have purposely chosen one without a high level of graphics to highlight that this is the employee’s one stop shop for working with the system, not simply a reporting system.

You will also note embedded integration with Outlook and this was the second item of interest to me. Clearly automated workflow is a hot technology topic for a law firm and the same applies for a manufacturing/distribution business. Documents need to be created and moved around for approval and processing by various departments and managers. Similarly with documents received.

Now obviously a law firm has a higher volume and greater variability of documents but what I liked about the workflow approach of the above systems is that a) it is closely embedded with Outlook and email so that the interaction with the user occurs through the use of this tool and b) while a more powerful workflow engine under pinned the approach (either WWF or a proprietary environment), the set up of the rules and the flow had a very simple and understandable user interface that made setting up basic workflows something that could be done by the everyday user.

The third item was that every proposal we received offered an externally hosted option. Whether this was through a relationship with a data centre, through their own facility or, with NetSuite, a true cloud based system, the client could choose to not have to manage the infrastructure for the application. This is what the company wanted because they only had a small IT team and had offices in Australia and the US.

All of this led me to wonder why some of these fundamental differences were in place and my take is that the general ERP market is significantly bigger than the legal market and, as a result, more competitive. Market forces therefore drive more innovative approaches to problem solving to win market share and retain customers.

Of course there are different drivers with a legal application but, to my mind, it will be interesting to see how the systems evolve in some of the areas above. Most interesting development to me is the Lexis Nexis partnership with Microsoft to produce a legal system based on Dynamics AX. I wonder how that is going?

For those that got this far, the client selected the Dynamics product.

I would love to hear other’s opinions on the above.