Peters & Peters take advantage of the power of Carpe Diem from Advanced Legal
About Peters & Peters
Peters & Peters has been described as the first, biggest, and most experienced business crime specialist in London. With a team that includes some of the world’s most experienced business crime lawyers, they use their expertise to win cases across the full range of contentious criminal and civil areas, both in the UK and internationally.
Their Business Crime and Investigations team is widely acknowledged as a leader in its sphere. The firm is cited by the Chambers UK legal directory as the “Outstanding financial crime practice”, and in the Legal 500 directory as “London’s best civil fraud litigation boutique”.
Their Advanced experience
As a Partner for Windows (P4W) user firm, Peters & Peters have used the system’s extensibility to develop a legal ecosystem that incorporates Advanced, and 3rd party, software. One of these integrated solutions is Carpe Diem, which is used across the firm to capture billable time.
We spoke with Brian McDonald, Head of IT, and Michael Gilbert, Director of Finance, to find out more about their experience using the platform.
“We’ve been using Carpe Diem for several years and it’s been an absolute game changer for our fee earners. Instantly, they went from having to log into P4W Time Manager to capture time, to being able to record time much more conveniently from any location, on any device”.
“From an IT perspective the system is extremely straightforward to manage. The licensing is clear and easy to understand and it’s a very simple product to deploy. New users can be set up really quickly and it’s so intuitive to use that all they need in terms of training is the user guide we provide”.
“The last three years have been our most successful ever and we keep increasing our revenue year-on-year. We have gained more fee earners, and that naturally leads to a rise in billing figures, but pound-for-pound this is in some part attributable to the implementation of Carpe Diem”.
“The quantity of time entries we log is vast, so for some time after we adopted Carpe Diem, we monitored usage. When we started almost everyone was using P4W to log their time, but today between 70% and 80% of our time records go into our system via Carpe Diem”.
Brian McDonald, Head of IT, Peters & Peters said: “It’s not a particularly expensive product, and in terms of return on investment, I’m sure it’s paid for itself over and over again.”
Key benefits of the system?
It’s very efficient. We see time entries coming in more quickly because they are so readily available to fee earners. We’ve also seen a reduction in the number of fee earner chaser emails, and bills are being sent out in a timely manner.
How is your relationship with Advanced?
Our relationship with the Advanced team is collaborative. Things have changed on both sides over the years, but they’ve always kept us in the loop to ensure we understand when anything of relevance is happening. We don’t really need on-going scheduled updates, but always knowing when something important is going to take place has been crucial to our satisfaction.
What’s next?
We’ve been using Carpe Diem for a good few years. It was a game-changer when we introduced it, and we’re currently planning an upgrade to the latest version.
