Richard Hugo-Hamman, Executive Chairman, LEAP
LEAP Legal Software, the UK’s leading provider of cloud legal software and automated forms and precedents to small and medium sized law firms, has announced a major new expansion initiative into the United States. LEAP has more than 2,000 firms and 12,000 users using its software in the UK and Republic of Ireland.
PCLaw | Time Matters is a new joint venture operated by LEAP Legal Software, the world’s leading provider of cloud-based legal software to small and medium-sized law firms, and LexisNexis Legal & Professional, part of RELX and a leading global provider of information and analytics.
The new company has taken over the extensive customer list of firms that use PCLaw and Time Matters in in the United States, Canada and Australasia.
According to Richard Hugo-Hamman, Executive Chairman of LEAP and now also of PCLaw | Time Matters LLC, “We are first and foremost a legal software company. It is all that we do. We focus all our efforts on providing the highest standards of customer support, and the most innovative and useful software for lawyers and support staff. We help our clients to build great law firms.
We believe that profitable and healthy law firms that ‘help people like us’ in the common areas of law such as family law, real estate, immigration, probate and the like are good for our communities. Surprisingly many small law firms don’t do well financially. It is our job to give them the tools to do more work with the same number of people and grow the profits of their firms. Our global success has been built on delivering on this promise.
We will immediately start improving the customer support experience for PC Law and Time Matters users with the introduction of our state-of-the-art online support experience built on the Salesforce technology stack that LEAP has used for more than a decade. We are also very aware that the crucially important Certified Independent Consultant (CIC) network is ready for a more focussed and active program to help them better serve their clients. They play a crucially important advisory role to many law firms, and we will make sure that they have all the information they need to provide good informed advice and to help them build their businesses. We think that a strong CIC network, well supported by the JV, will be good for our thousands of customers.
Another advantage that we bring to the table is that we have successfully electronically converted more than 4,000 law firms from desktop/on-premise software into the cloud. Our intellectual property and data transition experience around this change management means that we can help firms through this transition with minimum disruption to day to day operations and delightfully for the lawyers, when they start using LEAP all their familiar data is there for them.
We are very proud to have been chosen to work with LexisNexis to move their loyal clients to the cloud in as smooth and affordable a way as possible, when they choose to.”
Founded in 1992, LEAP has grown to become the first truly international provider of legal software for small to medium sized law firms. Hugo-Hamman continues: “Our approach is to leverage our core global software with software reflecting deep local knowledge in jurisdiction specific add-ons that allow LEAP to be uniquely familiar to anyone working in that jurisdiction. This means we have on the ground offices and people who will travel to see you and help you get going. We have development teams in each country who add and deliver this deep localisation.
Although we are a cloud company, our business model is based on knowing our customers and the legal environment they work in better than any competitor in the world. There is no substitute for sitting in front of a customer and getting unfiltered feedback. This is how we get the information we need to build great products.”
LEAP began to develop a cloud service offering during the financial crisis of 2008. After nearly five years of significant investment and product development LEAP began rolling out the cloud version of software to law firms in January 2013.
LEAP has taken clients on a major journey through technology. LEAP began in 1992 on a Mac platform. Since then LEAP has migrated users from Mac to several versions of Windows and more recently to the cloud. Clients who have stayed on the journey have avoided the disruption and cost of unnecessary change – LEAP has taken care of them.
All LEAP data is stored in AWS in dedicated facilities around the world.
Amazon Web Services is recognised as the world’s leading hosting platform. In June 2017 leading analyst firm Gartner noted that it was “most commonly chosen for strategic, organization wide adoption.” In February 2019 technology research firm Canalys listed AWS as the strong market leader for cloud infrastructure, with 32% of the market (in Q4 of 2017) and annual growth running at 46% showing a big corporate move into the cloud.
In the American Bar Association’s Legal Technology Resource Center’s 2018 Legal Technology Survey Report where almost half of the responses were from sole practitioners and small firm lawyers, 55% percent of respondents said they are now using cloud computing technology.
The most cited benefits of using cloud computing include accessing data from anywhere worldwide and 24/7 availability. These benefits are cited by 68% and 59% of respondents respectively. The low cost for cloud services, stronger security, robust data backup, recovery and speed of getting up and running are also seen as major benefits of the cloud over on-premise infrastructure.
Unrivalled Track Record
LEAP supports more than 8,000 law firms using its software worldwide on a single cloud platform. Over 50% of these firms have undergone a successful data transfer by LEAP to transition to the cloud platform. 3,000 firms started anew with LEAP cloud and kept historical data on premise. This is a common theme, firms wanting to use the installation of LEAP as a “fresh start”, making a clean break from the past and moving forwards into the cloud with the best software available.
As Mariska Lloyd, Global Transitions Manager of LEAP says, “We have the capability of moving firms from PC Law® and Time Matters to LEAP and the track record of doing so. We have never had a complaint about the accuracy of a data and document conversion from PCLaw® or Time Matters to LEAP.”
Chris Stock, the newly appointed CEO of PCLaw | Time Matters (and previous CEO of LEAP US) says, “We are delighted to be working with all users of PCLaw® and Time Matters to enhance their technology, enable mobile and remote working, and make firms more secure, efficient and profitable.”
