International law firm Osborne Clarke has completed its migration to the cloud with 3E, marking what Elite describes as a new milestone in the adoption of SaaS enterprise solutions among the world’s largest and most complex law firms.
With a legacy dating back more than 250 years, Osborne Clarke is an international law firm with a presence across Europe, Asia and the US, operating from 26 different locations around the globe.
The firm selected Elite 3E Cloud in 2021, mid-way through the Covid pandemic and well ahead of the curve when it comes to the PMS market, led at the time by IT director Nathan Hayes.
By moving to a SaaS-based financial and practice management solution, Osborne Clarke will get automatic updates and rapid access to new functionality, automated workflows, online billing, real-time insights, and advanced analytics, powered by the Microsoft Azure platform. It also becomes an early and bellwether adopter in a market where large firms are still struggling to shift their finance system to the cloud amid, in many if not most cases, a raft of customisation.
Osborne Clarke’s adoption of the SaaS-version of 3E is one of the key pillars of a broader technology-driven transformation for the firm and its core business technology solutions are now fully integrated with 3E.
We asked chief technology and transformation officer Jody Jansen for his key takeaways from the complex project.
Jody, when did you go live?
We went live in mid-July, following a year of preparation to ensure the switch would be successful and our teams were fully prepared.
What generally do you see as the key challenges around law firms moving their PMS to the cloud and how have you overcome them?
The complexity of existing systems and data was the main challenge. Getting this level of information ready to move to cloud, while making sure the migration could be completed successfully and simultaneously ensuring our clients’ data was protected, was a risk. We overcame this through our delivery team’s diligence and transparency, hitting every milestone and stress-testing each stage of the process to mitigate risk. We also built contingency plans for potential issues – though thankfully, none were needed as the migration was successful.
Is the functionality on par with on premises?
Yes, but moving to cloud will open up more opportunities to change how we operate moving forwards. It will be easier to make changes that would have required long periods of system downtime with on prem infrastructure. We will also be able to tap into the other benefits of the cloud such as greater levels of information security, quicker updates and more opportunities to test, learn and adapt our approach. All this will make sure we can deliver what clients want and react to changing external environments in a more dynamic way.
What are the learnings you can share from the project?
Operational readiness is critical. You need a full understanding of your systems, operations, data and dependencies before you do anything. By mapping this clearly, you can manage priorities, reduce internal disruption and ensure accuracy throughout.
What would you do differently?
As with any major change programme that is fundamental to how the firm operates, more time would always be appreciated, but as that’s not possible, I would look again at our dependencies between the differing elements of the PMS to see how we could make the transition smoother and more phased. This would have reduced some pressure on the teams and enabled the wider business to have more time to adjust to the changes.
What can you do now that you couldn’t before?
Largely speaking, what we can do today is very similar to what we were able to do before the transition – this was by design. The benefit of this switch is what happens next: we can be more dynamic and responsive to client needs, business priorities and the wider external and regulatory environment by aligning to the firm’s wider cloud strategy.
One immediate change is how we’re now able to better access near-real time data and interrogate this to make sure we’re meeting our goals and, most importantly, giving our teams all the information they need at their fingertips – with greater accuracy and agility.
We’ll bring you more PMS go-lives shortly and keep your eyes peeled for the updated UK top 200, out any day.
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