Browne Jacobson, a leading UK law firm listed among the top 100 firms, has set to implement Aderant Expert
UK top 100 law firm Browne Jacobson is set to go live on Aderant Expert this month, swapping out the LexisOne enterprise resource planning system that it selected in 2014. LexisOne – originally built by LexisNexis Enterprise Solutions and at Browne Jacobson based on Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 – was acquired by sa.global in 2019, becoming part of its Legal360 offering for law firms. With Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 being end of lifed this year, Browne Jacobson had to go out to market for a new HR system and a new finance system.
Led by IT director Abby Ewen, Browne Jacobson rolled out new HR system Access PeopleXD in February 2022, and invited both Aderant and Thomson Reuters Elite to pitch to become its new practice management system provider.
Ewen told Legal IT Insider: “Both Elite and Aderant did a very good RFP and for us the important thing was that they could cope with the complexity of NHS Resolution billing: we knew they could both do that, because they already have NHS panel firms using them and because they both built a prototype of what NHS billing would look like. Both had really good reference site calls. It was very close but at the end of the day, Aderant was a better fit for us.”
She added: “For us it was the cultural fit that swung it. We knew both products could do the job, but we felt that Aderant best suited a firm of this size, geographical distribution, and culture. Our relationship with them has been very good throughout.”
Given the tight time frame involved, Browne Jacobson has so far selected Aderant for finance only. Ewen said: “We’re just using Aderant Expert, no additional modules, but we were in a position where the timing meant that we had to go for a MVP. That doesn’t mean that there will be no phase three or four, and that could include all kinds of things – Aderant has been investing in the likes of HR and talent management and we’ll look at all of the different modules.”
Aderant Expert is set to go live on 9 May, and Ewen observed: “The project has been delivered to a relatively tight timetable and everyone has worked really hard to get to this point, but it has been extremely problematic from a data conversion perspective and the underlying data structure of the Lexis product was overly complex.”
Browne Jacobson turned to AAC in the United States for help with the implementation and Ewen said: “The data has been the hardest bit, and because no-one has every converted a Dynamics AX 2012-based LexisOne to Aderant, we couldn’t go to people and ask.”
LexisOne had a chequered development history, given Microsoft’s decision to end of life AX 2012, which saw LexisNexis pivot and rewrite the ERP to become a Dynamics 365 cloud solution. That solution is in place at UK top 50 law firm FieldFisher.
Ewen said: “It is unfortunate for us that we were in a position where we had to change our PMS only a relatively short time after implementing LexisOne. Microsoft’s withdrawal of support for the underlying Dynamics operation system and challenges with getting the system to do what the firm needed meant that we had to make the change.”
