Off the Shelf or Custom Made Software for Law Firms

When talking about having different software solutions for daily operations in law firms, there is one major bone of contention that needs to be addressed first. That contention is whether to have the software custom made (often interchangeably referred to as bespoke or tailor made) or to buy an off the shelf (already made and marketed) software. It is a tough decision to make as there are lot of good off the shelf software solutions or products available in market.

In a law firm, there are different requirements and for each one of them typically more than one software solution is required. Examples include, but not limited to, practice management system for managing contacts, calendars, client communication, cases, documents, and billing; docket management and/or IP management system for managing IP due dates; billing, vendor payments, and reconciliation solution for managing income and expenses; proof reading solution, e-discovery solution, contract drafting solution, patent specification drafting solution, and so on for delivering work products. A search about the 'off the shelf vs. tailor made software' lists out various pros and cons of both of these types software solutions. 

I am hereby just enumerating main differences for a ready reference that are generally looked into:

1. Price - Off the shelf is cheaper than custom made;

2. Updates - Off the shelf generally have updates that are suitable for their wide range of customers, and that may be slow to come up;

3. Build - Custom made, as the name suggests, is capable to suit particular needs of the firm rather than off the shelf as they are designed to suit wide range of customers;

4. Time & Resources to develop & install - Custom made takes a lot of time and resources to develop than off the shelf;

The other pros and cons are beautifully explained by Dave Miller at Alberon and blogs at Approved Index and BCS.

However, many senior attorneys asked me why I am going for custom made software. These attorneys have had the prior experience of using custom build software like Microsoft Case Management, time management, billing etc., and are therefore speaking from their experience. These solutions can be customized to suit the business requirements of law firm. This got me thinking as to business related reasons why one should go for off the shelf or the custom made in a law firm. The plain reason was a workflow set up that [Indian] law firms follow like a movement of physical file from one desk to another. The off the shelf solutions do not provide this feature. Some solutions, such as Inprotech, an IP management solution from CPA Global, do provide ‘workflows’ (a framework or template) but they need to be customized, thus validating the point. Off the shelf solutions work better for solo or small law firms where the cases and human resources are less and therefore do not require a proper workflow implementation. They are more interested in the analytics provided these off the shelf solutions that becomes necessary to track the growth of the firm along with monitoring revenues.

That brings us to one of the greatest advantages of off the shelf solutions, i.e., the provision of analytics and generating reports. A good data entry is required to have good analytics. Consequently, the off the shelf solution has typical pre-set data entry fields. On the contrary, the customized solution has same terms and same fields as used during physical file movement, thereby making the solution/software pretty easy to get accustomed with. This also makes the training of users on the customized software far easier than on the off the shelf solution since familiarity in process bring more acceptance towards the solution and also IT training in law firms is bit difficult.

However, the analytics is one missing feature of the customized solution. The analytics is very important for law firms whether solo law firm, small law firm, or large firm, from case analytics to financial analytics to personnel analytics. Typically, the analytics provided by customized software is very basic - in form of tables available in excel format for download. On the contrary, off the shelf software provides rich analytics - pie charts, bar graphs, bubble charts, line charts, etc. The ones that looks good during presentations and discussions. This is the USP of the off the shelf software. But developers often shy away from providing such rich analytics on the customized software citing load on databases or requirement of interfacing with specific analytics software. If only this can be provided, I think the argument in favour of the customized software can be easily won.

This is not to say that law firms should build their own software by hiring or expanding their internal IT team. The customized software should be built by vendors who are experts in building and maintaining software. Again, as I have been saying in my past articles, law firms must have a dedicated team for all these developments. Bring in lawyers if you like but ensure that they are not bothered with their deliverable else they will focus on their own deliverable.