National Law Firm Davies and Partners Solicitors has carried out a major upgrade of its IT infrastructure with DPS Software. The project has streamlined its systems onto a digital platform and future proofed its processes to establish a solid foundation to meet its ambitious growth plans.
Davies and Partners has been providing its clients with highly specialist legal services for over 30 years. The Firm employs 180 staff across its four offices in Birmingham, Bristol, Gloucester and London’s West End. The Firm is renowned in the property sector and a strong reputation in a wide range of legal services for business and private clients.
In developing the infrastructure changes, Davies and Partners considered various options and a range of systems available in the market. The Firm required a solution that incorporated its existing case management procedures with an automated reporting system for clients.
Davies and Partners had been working with DPS software for some years, having already had a level of hosting with DPS Cloud in relation to its automated report generation requirements for the Firm’s national house building clients.
The Firm’s key objective was to Introduce a single, fully integrated standardised system across its four offices, which will provide huge efficiency benefits for clients and for the Firm’s fee earners.
The major systems update is key to Davies and Partners objective of paperless working, which increases its efficiency for clients, provides stronger data security, a better use of space and improvements to the working environment for its employees.
Undertaking the System unification development was a large and critical task for DPS Software. Davies and Partners IT Manager Dan Smith said, “The Firm’s legacy accounting system had a vast amount of information that needed to be successfully migrated and it was a huge challenge to ensure the data transported over fully and successfully, causing the least disruption to employees and clients. The fact that DPS carried out a full pre-conversion test, allowed us to see how the changes would work before we went live, which helped settle the nerves and soothed the change in management process.”
He continued, “The data migration was a critical task but not as challenging as connecting the case management files to the accounting files from the previously separate and unconnected systems. We were very happy with DPS’ implementation of the new systems and both employees and clients are now seeing the benefits.”
The move to the Cloud took a huge amount of preparation with provision for disaster recovery and business continuity together with fully flexible secure working, allowing staff to log on and safely work from anywhere. The project to switch the whole business to the Cloud took just over six months to plan and four weeks to implement, including an employee training programme.
Once the systems had been migrated to give the business a single software platform the whole firm was moved to the Azure Cloud by DPS. At the start of 2019, Davies and Partners went live with their Cloud based ‘Financial Director’ on the Microsoft Azure Platform.
Davies and Partners Chief Executive Ewan Lockhart said, “This has been a massive investment in the Firm’s infrastructure which has given us the means for unlimited expansion of space and the highest security levels available. This investment has provided future-proofing, safeguarding and business continuity which benefits our both clients and our employees.”
DPS Managing Director Osman Ismail said “Davies and Partners have been a fantastic client of DPS for over 15 years. They have always been pro-active in ensuring they get the best out of the software and have worked closely with us to ensure we provide them with exactly what they need”.
