Document and practice management, target state
An evidence-based requirements analysis across two platform categories, built from how the firm actually works.
- Services
- Needs analysis
- Period
- Apr – Jun 2026
- Scope
- Document and practice management for an independent South Australian firm, around 90 staff across four offices
Sixteen years on a single system
The firm runs its entire practice on one on-premise platform: matters, documents, email, time recording, billing and finance. It has done so for about sixteen years, and it sits several major releases behind the version the vendor now ships.
The consequences were ordinary and constant. Documents one person at a time could edit. Search that could not reliably find the word will
in a wills and estates practice. Email that accumulated unfiled in the thousands. Files that took minutes to locate from home and seconds in the office, and workarounds that people had stopped thinking of as workarounds.
An independent review the previous year had put a substantial annual cost on all of this and scored the platform poorly. It stopped short of saying what should replace it. A strategy refresh had already named technology as the firm's main capability gap, and the partners' position was that this was the chief executive's problem to solve. He needed an answer that would hold up in a partnership meeting and a budget round.
Score the options, and show the working
We started from how the firm actually works rather than from a feature list. Six people were interviewed across property, family law, wills and estates, finance and IT: two partners, a senior associate, an assistant, the finance manager and the IT manager. Their processes were mapped — matter intake, email filing, billing, trust and cheque approvals, precedents.
Those processes became the criteria. Around sixty of them, grouped under functional fit, integration and technology, delivery and vendor, and risk and commercials, each scored and each with its evidence recorded. Eight candidate platforms were scored, the incumbent among them, so the comparison had a baseline rather than a wish list.
One group of criteria covered AI readiness, and it was not about which vendor had shipped a chat box. Whether the data is open. Whether the vendor is investing. Whether the platform could support agentic workflows at all.
A recommendation the partners could check
The output was a forty-page report, the scoring framework as a workbook, an indicative five-year cost model and two implementation options. Document management first, practice management about six months behind it.
- Shortlist
- Cloud, best-of-breed platforms for document and practice management, with a second practice-management candidate carried through as a validation check on the recommendation.
- Not recommended
- The highest-scoring document platform was judged over-engineered for a firm of this size. The score was evidence, not the decision.
- Cost model
- Licensing and implementation over five years in low, medium and high ranges. It corrected estimates the firm had been working from.
- Roadmap
- A phased two-year plan, plus an accelerated alternative added once the partners made clear they wanted to move faster, with the risks of the shorter path stated.
- Change
- Change management costed as a defined share of the programme rather than left to absorb itself.
Instinct replaced with evidence
From the first scoping call to the final report, with the draft landing on the date promised.
From the final report to the firm sitting in vendor demonstrations, with us in the room at the client's request and expense.
The report was signed off without further change. The chief executive went to his partners with a documented case rather than a preference.
Nothing has been implemented yet. The direction is settled and the demonstrations are done, so there is no measured outcome to report.
I think it is a very rigorous analytical piece of work.
Have a problem shaped like this one?
Fixed-scope discovery to start.
Strata: Simon — Unsplash