Hong Tran
Driven by the desire to help firms with their biggest challenges
As always at Accesspoint, we are driven by the desire to help firms to deal with their biggest challenges, and we covered a lot of this at our 2024 Innovators Forum. We are however constantly being asked by firms about if and when they should change their legacy Practice & Case Management System (PCMS). Anything that’s client server based in my opinion is a legacy system. These systems are on the way out, whether the suppliers choose to issue end of life notices or not. The writing is on the wall, as the world moves to cloud-based solutions and services, for the myriad of reasons that are too long to cover in one blog post.
If and when should you change your legacy PCMS?
My opinion is that firms should start to plan for that move away, if they have not done so already. Now, that could be within a few months, it could be within 2 years or even 5 years. But it is an eventuality now and each firm needs to consider their individual circumstances (which is different for all firms) and start to plan appropriately.
What we see from firms moving from one PCMS to another
Through our data migrations team, we get to see the various movements of firms moving from one PCMS system to another; so we can see the trends in real life and get to see how the suppliers are reacting to these movements.
The legal PCMS market is in a state of flux and constant consolidation
This unfortunately means uncertainty for many firms on certain systems. We have recently seen some PCMS suppliers holding a firm’s data to ransom effectively, charging considerable sums of money to access their own data. We have also seen firms coming to the end of their contracts being presented with huge annual increases and left with only weeks to find a new system and migrate their data, consequently having no choice but to accept.
Plan and move on your own terms
I’m not for one moment suggesting that any other PCMS providers out there are going to do what I’ve mentioned above, but my advice is to plan and move on your own terms. Keep updated on the current market; look at market–leading cloud-based systems like Actionstep and NetDocuments at your own leisure, rather than if forced to and at haste. Get a feel for what you would move to and why. There are some firms that review their PCMS every 2-3 years as a matter of routine. Consider being one of them.
So, what is Accesspoint’s position with this backdrop of uncertainty?
We promise our clients to:
- Support firms on their current systems as some of the suppliers effectively wind down.
- Continue to innovate and provide practical solutions to plug the gap such as our Mozaique, and bespoke, software solutions and various integrations with innovative 3rd party software. You can’t stand still as a business, just because you are planning to change your PCMS. The firm still needs to compete effectively in their market and provide clients with the best experience in the interim.
- Stay ahead of the market in terms of assessing and working with the best legal tech solutions to guide firms when they are ready to make that move.
- Help firms to determine the right path for them, whether that is moving to a new PCMS system now or taking a staged approach such as moving certain components like their document store to a Dedicated Document Management System like NetDocuments or implementing Specialist Solutions like Ochresoft’s Intelliworks Workflows, first.
- Gear up our implementation services to be ready for firms as and when the time is right for them to move to a new PCMS. We are in a great position to help with these implementations as we have great knowledge of both the outgoing and incoming systems and with many of our clients, also an understanding of the firm itself and the different teams within the firms.
- Continue to develop our agnostic solutions such as Mozaique so that they can integrate with the firm’s future tech stack. So, for firms that have already implemented Mozaique, we would look to integrate that with their next PCMS systems and indeed a Mozaique integration with Actionstep is due for release in early 2025.
Our relationship with clients is more important than just pushing products and services
I like to think that at Accesspoint, we place more importance in the relationships with clients than just about pushing products and services. We have a genuine desire to support and guide our clients through the myriad of legal tech solutions and to give them and their users the right solutions that can genuinely make a difference to theirs and their firm’s success.
I believe that if you can get that right, then the commercial success will always naturally flow from there. It also makes working with clients and on projects a bit more enjoyable and as you all know, at Accesspoint, we do like to have a bit of fun along the way!
