April 08 London firm Druces & Attlee chooses SOS Connect
City of London Druces & Attlee select SOS Connect for practice management following strategic review
London 6 February 2008 — City of London firm Druces & Attlee has selected SOS Connect from Solicitors Own Software (SOS) to modernise its practice management systems following a strategic review of the business 18 months ago. SOS Connect has been chosen to help the firm streamline operations, improve client services and fuel greater profitability. The aim is also to lay a modern IT foundation to support future growth and the imminent switch to LLP status in May this year.
SOS Connect replaces the incumbent Norwel system which Druces has used for many years. As well as accounting, SOS Connect will enable Druces to automate many new areas of business for the first time, such as document management, client inception processes and e-mail management.
Druces is a medium sized firm with a history of 250 years’ servicing a broad range of clients – from high net worth individuals to multi-national corporations across company/commercial law, litigation, private client services, charity and property specialties. Following the review, the firm has taken on a new partner bringing the total to 13, is recruiting aggressively and has re-organised departments to minimise duplicated effort.
Recognising the need to re-vamp IT, Druces initially referred to the Law Society’s Software Solutions Guide, whittling down seven possible contenders to three. The prime requirement was for the application to interface with Microsoft Outlook and present all tasks and processes through a single, unified interface.
“At the moment”, said Andrea Beard, office manager; “users may have as many as 20 windows open at any one time. SOS Connect will provide a much easier and efficient working environment, automating many administrative tasks and increasing fee earning time. We chose SOS Connect as the most progressive solution; SOS also showed more vision than other suppliers giving us the confidence that the system will retain its leading edge.”
SOS Connect is a web-based application (built using the Microsoft .NET framework) and importantly also helps Druces to achieve its goal of providing a good work/life balance, supporting remote working either from home or while on the move.
