Steven Bradley notes in particular a number of Hosted Chambers Management Systems, Hosted Email Services, Telephony Service Providers, and Online Backup Service Providers. This short note covers some other services used specifically by solicitors.

Outsourcing accounts and practice management

Solicitors can outsource their accounts and practice management systems thus avoiding the need to buy or maintain the hardware and software normally required for in-house operation. This type of service is particularly attractive for new firms and indeed virtual firms. Here are three of the best and longest established legal software companies now offering hosted services:

Quill offers Pinpoint Office which enables a firm not only to have the accounts software owned, managed and located at Quill, but also to use Quill’s cashiers. Quill have nearly 200 practices using the service and they employ 45 legal cashiers. Other Pinpoint services include payroll, digital dictation and word processing.

Pracctice, which now operates mainly under the name of their key software, Osprey.TM, offers their practice management (which includes accounts and case management) online, ie the software and data is held by Pracctice and the system accessed online as required.

SOS offers a new outsourced cashiering service called Virtual Practices. This provides full management of the accounts with free .NET software for online access and other services, including time recording, fee earner software and matter management.

Outsourcing case tracking

Another area of interest is case tracking, particularly for conveyancing, where the matter software and data information is held on a third party’s system; the firm provides updates to this as milestones are reached. Although some of the existing software companies are able to provide hosted services of this kind, the key players in this market are newer companies:

ConveyanceLink, provides the software for online case tracking on its own site, as a service, and charges on a pay-as-you-go basis. Their software also links in with estate agents’ software and provides HIPS modules as well.

Easyconvey.com, provides a range of conveyancing software most of which is run on the firm’s own systems but also provides a module called Track-a-Matter, which is run on their own secure servers.