Summers: One needs to be able to count on one’s infrastructure providers to be an asset rather than a liability. SOS have been a major asset from the very beginning and continue to be so
By Legal Futures’ Associate SOS Legal
Since beginning their practice with just 3 partners in 2010, Temple Bright has experienced strong and steady growth. Now boasting seventy partners and locations in both Bristol and London, the firm has garnered a host of clients. Startups, SMEs, multi-nationals, and public sector bodies all come to Temple Bright for their commercial law services – and the partners at Temple Bright can handle the caseload thanks to their foundational investment in SOS Connect+.
Tim Summers, a partner at Temple Bright, takes us through his experience of working with SOS Legal and the benefits his firm is seeing as a result of using SOS Connect.
Project Highlights: Enabling Sustainable Growth
- Easy to use with relatively little training
- Friendly and highly responsive support team
- Allows lawyers to access case-related documents anywhere, with any device
- Concentrates multiple functions in a single app
About Temple Bright
Temple Bright is a commercial law firm that was founded in Bristol in 2010. Although we began with just three partners, we grew rapidly, opening a second location in London in 2013. Throughout this time, we’ve been using SOS Connect+ to support our client-facing services as well as our partners on the backend. We consider the application to be integral to our growth.
Why SOS Connect+?
We began using SOS Connect+ from our inception as a firm. It was the only practice management system that placed all of the functions we needed into a single application. These included filing, correspondence and document management, time recording and billing, matter ledgers and a cashier function. These are features that are time-consuming to manage manually but are nonetheless critical to running a firm.
With these features at our disposal, SOS Connect+ enabled us to keep our overheads low while giving our partners the tools that they needed to focus on their client work, while spending a minimum of time on data entry or document management. Lastly, we were able to keep our staff leaner, with a higher ratio of lawyers to support staff.
What We Needed from a Practice Management Solution
Switching between multiple applications consumes time – plus it’s both more difficult and more expensive to maintain a network of related applications that share data. If we could find a practice management solution that combined multiple functions in the same program, we could keep costs down and become more productive at the same time.
No Training Wheels with SOS Legal
One of the cornerstones of our efficiency is the ability to hire a new partner and then get them working at full capacity as soon as possible. With SOS Connect +, that cornerstone was in place from the moment we founded our firm. The Connect+ practice management software is intuitive and easy to use, letting our newest partners get completely up to speed in just a short time.
In addition, we’ve found that any occasional hiccup is quickly resolved by a friendly and capable support staff. SOS offers training directly – which has always helped with onboarding – and support always answers our questions in a timely manner. Most of the time, however, Connect+ works perfectly. One great example is from 2011, when we switched to a remote desktop solution that Connect+ was able to integrate with seamlessly.
One last benefit of Connect+ has been its ability to support remote access. Because we’re spread across two locations, it is important that each office has the ability to tap into a central database of files. Connect+ makes it easy for partners to share documents across locations in a secure and compliant manner.
Benefits from using SOS Connect+
We would recommend SOS Connect+ for all of the practice areas that we cover. With Connect+, our most important practice management functions are concentrated in a full-featured application that’s easy to use and quick to learn. There are plenty of external challenges in running and growing a law firm and one needs to be able to count on one’s infrastructure providers to be an asset rather than a liability. SOS have been a major asset from the very beginning and continue to be so.
