Angus Whyte, managing partner at Land Law, on why the niche commercial property firm designed its own cloud-based platform

Q Why did the firm decide to design its own IT platform?

A Commercial property is among the most document-heavy practice areas in the legal sector – the work has a lot of moving parts. For example, a single transaction can easily generate dozens of lengthy documents as well as layers of title information that has gone before. A firm like ours ends up working on multiple projects with different individual clients throughout the year – it’s a lot to keep track of. And though we’ve continued to digitise our practice over the last decade or so, the pace of change in technology and the rate at which we have grown means that we needed a more flexible and capable system than was currently available to manage our entire administration – so we set out to design our own. Our aim is agility – we want to be able to store the more than three million documents that we’ve accumulated since the firm was founded, but also operate to the best of our ability. Speed, convenience and avoiding wholly unnecessary fees are very important to us and our clients, and we must be able to do so without compromising on security. Technology in the legal sector continues to transform relationships with clients. For us, we’ve already seen the clear benefits from using our own system, even in the very short time since it went live.

Q What did it take to design your own system?

A We use Box.com to allow clients to view their files in real time. It costs £20 per user per month, which is phenomenal value. Everything I have worked on over the last 20 years, I can see on my phone. I’m blown away by it. We had a previous solution but would have struggled to make it compliant with GDPR. Box is already compliant, and you can do things like grant people the right to view something for a limited period of time. So, the agent recently told me that they’d given 22 people access to a marketing pack, and asked, “Which are the best bids?” I could say, “Those are the 13 people who have gone in, and this is what they downloaded.” We have also moved all of our accounting to the cloud (to Xero). It’s less than £100 a month for all the accounting software. Every bill we’ve ever done, every disbursement issued, is all available. It also links directly with our bank. Because it’s cloud-based, our partners can be given various levels of visibility. And our cloud-based time-recording system allows fee earners to bill through Xero.

Q Why use cloud-based solutions?

A We’ve always digitised clients’ property portfolios, but I also wanted to enable them to view their files in real time whenever they want so that they don’t need to call us. They might have multiple solicitors advising them, but our portals are up to date so they can find the information, even via their smartphones. Also, you want all fee earners, whether on a bus or working (as our finance specialist does) in a holiday home in Switzerland, to see exactly the same information. We only use products that open up their APIs so that we can bolt on things that make different elements of our software packages talk to one another. You never have the same data stored in two different places. People can log into a portal
index to see what’s changed, or it can be set up so that they get notifications.

Q How long did it all take to implement?

A We took our accounting function to Xero in January 2017, and switched over to Box in January 2019. However, we’ve been doing this for 14 years and it’s gone through different iterations. It is a process, but an SME law firm could do it tomorrow if they wanted to – if you have a hierarchical folder structure, you can easily migrate that to Box.

Q What advice do you have for other SME law firms looking to do a similar project?

A Don’t be mean about monthly subscriptions! Also, get top advice – we have two employees who work on our IT, in addition to consultants and developers. And don’t get locked into bespoke software – go for generic products.

This article can be found in LPM May magazine: The right protection?