Ian Gilthorpe, Senior Partner, Square One Law
Square One Law the 16 partner, Newcastle based, commercial law firm has chosen Peppermint Technology, with its Microsoft Dynamics CRM cloud based technology platform, as a cornerstone in the further scale up and development of its business.
From a standing start, in seven months, Square One Law, with the full support of all its project partners, has successfully completed not just a full data migration to Peppermint Technology, but has also implemented a completely new hosted desktop environment with MS Office and MS Exchange including migration of all documents, email accounts and calendars.
Square One Law has selected Peppermint Technology as its strategic business partner because of the benefit of the integrated functionality in areas such as ‘360 degree client view’ and ‘relationship management’ bring to support client service and the Square One Law way of working.
Senior Partner, Ian Gilthorpe said: ‘This is such an important investment for us. It has been a challenging project in a timescale driven by the annual exit opportunity from our previous cloud based provider and we have been well supported by the wider project team. The success of the project and the enthusiastic approach of everyone in our team, ensured that the firm was able to go live on time with all systems available, people trained, data balanced and functionality deployed with minimal disruption to the business.
“We saw an opportunity in the legal marketplace in 2011 to launch a new law firm, that was more agile, better at communication and could attract talented and ambitious lawyers. Following feedback from a range of clients and business contacts we have developed a way of working which relies on our people working seamlessly as teams and creating and reinforcing, close trusted relationships with our clients and business partners.
“This means we need to listen, be agile and our culture has developed so the whole team focusses on delivering outstanding service to the client, with the right tone of voice, every time.
The Peppermint Technology software platform is ideally suited to our way of working and our entire team is already enthusiastically working with Peppermint, which is an innovative and intuitive product, and can see how its use will improve our service delivery further. In fact, after the training, the whole team could see great benefit in working with Peppermint and how it would support our differentiation from other legal firms.”
Arlene Adams Peppermint CEO added “Peppermint’s innovative technology and approach attracts like-minded businesses and Square One Law is no exception. We are building a strong and influential community of legal providers who are at the forefront of transforming UK legal services”
“Right from our first engagement it was apparent that Square One Law was built on the ethos of outstanding service. They are obsessive about their client experience and that made Peppermint a natural choice. The implementation has been a big success and that is largely down to the team at Square One Law recognising this was a business project, not a technology project. They invested in their own project management and allowed their own people the proper time and attention on the project. This approach has ensured a successful project for everyone. I know that Square One Law will continue to be a key contributor to the Peppermint community and product going forward”
Square One Law is the fastest growing commercial law firm in the UK with average growth of over 35% a year for the previous 4 years. Now a full service commercial firm, in 2016 it completed 22 corporate deals of over £500k, with a value of £290m. The firm has won Insider North East Corporate Law Firm of the Year for 2 out of the last 3 years and has won Law Firm of the Year at the Northern Law Awards for the past two years.
Ian Gilthorpe concluded: “There has been a significant investment in time into this project and at the same time as the main migration to Peppermint, the firm has also undertaken a data cleansing exercise with its current CRM application with a view to migrating the data as phase 2 of the project ensuring we will have clean data with the new system.”
