The legal sector has been lagging when it comes to Information Technology, but rising cost pressures and stagnant growth in this profession over the last few years, have forced them to now try their best to catch up.

Partnering Up

This is translating into increased pressure for solution providers like Thomson Reuters Elite who want to keep up to date with all of the demands from its clients. This is why they decided to turn to CenturyLink in order to meet all their cloud hosting needs. A partnership was recently announced which will have CenturyLink providing scalable, and secure cloud environments to help clients of ProLaw transform their businesses by integrating them with CenturyLink’s Cloud platform.

Even though this collaboration is a new one, Elisabet Hardy, the VP for product management at Thomson Reuters Elite, has said that CenturyLink has been their partner for over ten years already, and has a relationship with their risk and financial management business unit. It fits in quite well with ProLaw. They provide cost-effective offerings for all their prospects.

As part of their legal services, Elite provides end-to-end enterprise business management offerings which enable law firms as well as professional service organizations to run every operational aspect of their firm including risk management, business development, financial management, and matter and client management. With access to their portfolio of cloud technology for developing and deploying enterprise applications, clients are now going to be able to reduce costs and drive increased efficiency from their IT resources.

Planning

Apart from technology, the way they partner is an excellent testament to why they are a prolific choice for Thomson Reuters. Hardy was quite impressed by how well their planning was and how they took out the time to understand how ProLaw works with its customers.

John Lippman, CenturyLink’s MD for financial services, said that it was important to look at their relationship with Thomson Reuters from the point of view of their customers embracing a digital transformation so it could create a business model which would add sustainable visibility into the value which is delivered. They also looked at how CenturyLink can ensure predictability in terms of cost and create mechanisms which would reduce costs with time for their ProLaw’s client base.

Hardy has said that Thomson Reuters could have tried to create this technology on their own, but that is not what they are good at. CenturyLink didn’t just offer cloud services; they offered a number of other services as well.

Needing to Change

One of the biggest drivers for ProLaw’s cloud is that the legal industry is transforming itself because of tremendous pressure to change pricing models and cut costs. Customers are looking for ways to price legal services predictably and easily. That’s why their customers now need to stay better in touch with software as compared to the past. They need to start using technology more.

Improving Your Odds

Small and mid-size law firms that don’t have IT staff of their own find this most challenging but embracing the correct technology through the right partners can be advantageous and will allow them to compete with bigger firms in this industry which hasn’t seen too much growth and has not gravitated that strongly to incorporate technology into their business.

You saw this in season 7 of The Good Wife as well with the older lawyers not wanting to change that much and not listening to the younger lawyer who saw a better idea on how to run the law firm utilizing technology.