November 10, 2006
Law Firms with Elite Enterprise Contemplate the Future
Citytech, a London based magazine, tracks the goings on (events, people, gossip and feedback) involving IT in the global technology industry with a primary focus on professional practices in the UK and USA. Citytech’s most current issue, number 44 dated November 7, 2006, includes an article addressing Thomson Elite’s push to get law firm clients to abandon their current Elite® system and purchase the company’s new “Next Generation” system, “Elite 3E®”. Showing her British side, Karen Jones’ article is titled “3E or not 3E? That is the question.” She notes that 3E is not an upgrade, “it’s a whole new deal” and “the legal market has its heckles up and is asking why pay again?”
The Juris folks have been telling me for some time that inquiries from existing Elite law firms who are now considering Juris have been climbing in the face of an apparent Thomson Elite push to get their clients to move to Elite’s latest product iteration. If the Citytech interview with Kaye Sycamore holds up, the Thomson Elite folks are softening their message. Kay is Thomson Elite’s Sales Director for the UK and Ireland.
Kay explains it this way “We aren’t asking any existing customers to migrate; Enterprise is going to continue side by side with full Elite support and backing. We want new customers and new markets and that is what 3E has been developed for.” She went on to explain that “There have been so many major technological developments in the last five years that we had to make the decision to stay with our current legacy system—Enterprise—or break free to create more benefits.”
I do sympathize with the Elite folks; Juris had to make the same move several years ago. Elite was a little behind the curve in bringing its technology current. Juris provided existing law firms with a significant existing client discount to make migrating to current generation technology easier for them. Juris also supported both the classic and new generation of Juris for a number of years to avoid forcing law firms on the classic system to abandon their prior investment prematurely. Given Kay’s “side by side” comment, it appears that Elite is likewise becoming more sensitive to the interests of those who invested heavily in Elite’s prior generation Enterprise system—what Kay Sycamore calls their legacy system.
But in spite of the “side by side” sales spin, Thomson Elite will, of course, shift their energy and resources behind their new flagship product, 3E. Eventually their support of Enterprise will go away or erode in quality as the number of legacy Enterprise systems in use declines. Those law firms with Enterprise will eventually have to go somewhere—to 3E or to alternatives from other vendors. It is a matter of time.
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Filed under Technology by Tom Collins