Digital White Papers

24 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT Migrating on Our Own Terms: A Finance System Conversion is alive and well within the Thomson empire, though it might not get as much corporate love as its Elite siblings. Rippe and Kingston, Tabs3 (Soware Technology, Inc.) and Orion have remained independent companies focused on financial management soware. All of this means there are more firms than ever contemplating the future of their financial management system. Proactive firms are taking a hard look at their needs and available alternatives, not just accepting whatever their current vendor wants to hand them. Despite some consolidation, there is still a great variety of products available. Chances are more than one will meet your needs. Making the Decision My firm used Omega from 2008 to 2014. Once Aderant announced its acquisition of Omega in 2012, many Omega employees with whom we had worked for years le the company. Not long aer, Aderant announced it would no longer develop Omega and encouraged existing customers to switch to another Aderant product. Maintenance costs continued to rise rapidly, and, by 2013, we had lile to show for the money we sent Aderant's way. It was clear Omega would not remain viable for us, so I made the case for a switch. I wanted our firm to choose an alternative and migrate on our own terms. A firm can be forced into a move if it finds itself running a system that cannot be upgraded nor run well on modern server and workstation platforms. By the end of 2013, I had budgeted money for a system conversion and made plans to work with our finance team on the selection process. We headed to the Legaltech conference in New York to get a quick look at several candidates –– conferences are a great way to "speed date" vendors. In two short days at Legaltech, we met with representatives from Rippe & Kingston, Orion, ProLaw, Tabs3, Aderant, Elite and PerfectLaw. We then narrowed the field to the three we wanted to bring to our office for extensive demos. Moving efficiently through the selection phase was critical to keeping the project on a reasonable timetable. Scheduling a finance conversion around tax season, year-end processing and the holidays is tough, and we learned the actual migration would probably take about four months once we got on our chosen vendor's schedule. We were not the only firm wanting to switch, so migration schedules were filling up fast. Going into the next phase of the vendor selection process, we needed a good idea of what we wanted to achieve. We worked quickly to put together a requirements list, which included the processes and procedures of our current finance system we wanted to keep plus a list of areas for improvement, such as beer reporting, beer vendor support and a more user-friendly interface. We also considered capabilities we would want in the future: » A hosted system instead of an on-premises one » The ability to provide dashboards to partners to give them beer insight into the performance of their maers » A way to consolidate other practice management functions, such as conflicts, records and docketing, into the new product There are more firms than ever contemplating the future of their financial management system.

• Cover