Q&A: A paradigm shift?

With Thomson Elite describing its latest financial and practice-management software, Elite 3E, as its most “significant product launch in its 58-year history”, Managing Partner asks Jitendra Valera, the company’s vice president, international, to explain the excitement.

What have been the main developments of the past year for Thomson Elite?

Key developments within Thomson Elite over the past year can be categorised as follows:

New products: we continue to invest more in product research and development. The results of this are innovative product solutions for our customers. In the last year we have successfully introduced a number of major new products and enhancements to market, including Elite Enterprise 3.5, Webview 5.0, Outlook integration, Elite Practice Manager and West km for Transactions;
Acquisitions: in addition to experiencing strong organic growth, we have made a number of strategic acquisitions. We acquired Wilson Technology (now Elite Technical Services), a consulting firm specialising in development services for the Elite product line. And through Thomson, we also took over responsibility of Hubbard One, a very successful business providing marketing and business-development solutions to law firms;
Service and support enhancements: we successfully enhanced our customer services and support capabilities with the opening of our new ‘Centre of Excellence’ in Albuquerque, and we continue with the ongoing certification of support centres and project managers as we roll out our Project Quality Model.

These developments align to changes we have witnessed in the legal profession, whereby firms require sophisticated technology solutions to achieve competitive advantage. Following several years of internal IT development, firms are also unlikely to accept second best.

In our 26 years of serving the legal sector, we have seen many changes including, in most recent times, an ongoing trend towards strategic change management, where law firms are moving from a traditional partnership to a corporate business model. Within this, firms are concentrating resources not only on the back office, but also on integrating wider needs, such as marketing/business development, knowledge management and HR.

Elite’s developments described above demonstrate our aim and ability to support firms in these critical business processes and management needs.

How does Elite 3E differ from your previous product/service offerings?

Elite 3E isn’t just a new application – it is a business process platform – it enables professional firms to embed their business processes in our software;
3E was built from the ground up to enable the software to work the way firms work – it recognises the business changes that law firms have already made and looks to support those developments over the coming years, rather than demanding firms to change already effective business strategies to suit a technology investment. Organisations don’t need to conform to a predetermined product design. This offers firms tremendous flexibility to automate and optimise their businesses in a way that makes sense to them – individually – and to support their strategic goals;
The 3E platform for the next generation of Elite software is based on the most advanced technologies available, ensuring longevity and protecting customers’ investments. We believe this answers concerns among law firms regarding spiralling costs based on short-lived/quickly outdated technologies. It essentially ‘future-proofs’ their investment;
Automated workflows and ad hoc collaboration capabilities are built in to the system, so users can share information at critical junctures and ensure management directives are met. This enables firms to truly realise gains in efficiency in both time and effort, while providing competitive edge.

How will Elite 3E better meet the specific needs of law firms?

With years of specialisation in developing software solutions for professional firms behind us, and with over 900 clients in 35 countries, our domain expertise in this area is significant. All of the design and technology features that went into 3E were developed for the purpose of better meeting the needs of law firms. Prior to 3E’s launch, Thomson Elite collaborated with a select handful of the world’s most prominent law firms, currently in various stages of implementation. Russ Houlden, finance director at Lovells, said: “We want to make a step change from a late 20^th-century billing system to a leading-edge integrated 21st-century finance system, for the benefit of our clients, lawyers and finance team. We believe that, with 3E, Lovells will set the standard for others to follow.”

Thomson Elite knows successful organisations embrace technology, and the company has observed that customers view 3E as a valuable asset. Some of the benefits our customers will be able to reap from 3E include automated workflow processes, enhanced metrics and analytics, integrated business intelligence, individualised reporting, improved business-management capabilities, spontaneous collaboration, an open-standards base, scalability, greater security, a services architecture, and easy deployment of customer-specific applications.

What kind/size of law firm are you primarily targeting with this product and why?

One of the aspects of 3E we are most proud of is its technology that can scale to fit any size firm. Elite’s success to date has been evidenced within some of the largest global law firms, but we expect that, with the flexibility of 3E and the ability to integrate it into the business processes of firms, whatever their size, there will be additional interest from the medium to small firms too.

How would you rate your current offering against recent developments among your competitors?

Many of the developments from our competitors are limited to enhancements based on an older platform, and in trying to offer increased functionality in the core financial-management and matter-management application areas. At Elite, such developments are a standard part of our product enhancement and release lifecycle.

The 3E offering is fundamentally different – this is a paradigm shift. The next-generation 3E platform approaches the needs of the law firm not only from a core applications perspective, but also from the unique way the organisation works. Elite 3E enables the firm to automate the functionality within the process – and in a way that’s rapidly customisable and managed by the firm itself using the 3E platform and tools.

This approach of embedding the business process within the core functionality offers real and measurable gains in business productivity and performance.

How did you collaborate with clients prior to the product launch?

We assembled an advisory group made up of executives and subject-matter experts from large law firms. This group went through an intensive set of exercises to identify the characteristics that would make a financial and practice-management-software system better for them. We absorbed their feedback and incorporated it into 3E.

We also worked with a small number of firms who saw the 3E vision as we did, and who began implementation of the new system as it was developed.

What are the most challenging issues you face in implementing this software?

Elite implementations are now performed under the guidelines of the Elite Project Quality Model (PQM). This PQM initiative is aimed at improving and formalising project-management methodology on both the client and vendor side, and at providing a robust framework for project execution. Elite consultants now use PQM to ensure that service delivery is completed successfully and in the most efficient and cost-effective manner. Under this model, each project consists of vision, strategy, execution, closure and transition phases, each of which is governed by monitoring and measurement activities.

How do you intend to convince firms to invest in this next-generation product, if they have already spent significant sums on a PMS?

Professional firms do not change their core financial and practice-management systems every day. However, every so often a new next-generation technology or approach comes to market that has the potential of transforming the industry.

We believe 3E is just such a solution. In what is now a very competitive market, firms need the best-in-class products.

Firms that choose 3E will gain significant competitive advantage as they will be more efficient, productive and have better information to manage the firm to achieve better profits.

You mention the product’s ability to enable better global collaboration, but how will you be supporting firms and end users to truly get the most out of this functionality, when success also rests so highly on a firm’s culture?

Because 3E allows firms to embed their business processes into the applications, we’re enabling the software to work the way they work. Regardless of how one firm’s culture differs from another, users don’t have to change the way they do business to use 3E.

Nevertheless, change will happen and this needs to be managed carefully. Thomson Elite has built up a wealth of experience in helping law firms deploy systems over many years. In almost every case, a deployment is more than just an implementation of a system. It absolutely impacts the culture and introduces change at various levels. More often than not, Thomson Elite project managers and consultants play the role of ‘advisor’, passing on best practices know-how and assisting in navigating through the difficulties that change brings. We expect that we will continue to play this important role with 3E.

How does this product fit into Elite’s overall goals and plans?

Our overarching vision is to give our customers a strategic and competitive advantage with the most advanced tools available. We believe 3E represents a change in professional-services technology in the same way that the move to relational databases and client/server systems radically changed the competitive landscape in the last generation.

Jitendra Valera is vice president, international, at Thomson Elite. He can be contacted at elite.enquiries@thomson.com or on 0800 011 2814.