Mr Grattage makes some very good points in this article however I would like to make an observation on a couple of them. The point is well made that law firms should invest in staff and processes rather than in software however the software is usually the framework around which many of the processes are hung. Very little software is perfect and capable of being adapted to follow any process so I would argue that however much one might try and break the link between processes and the software that drives them I have never come across a firm who has not modified or completely rewritten their processes to fit around the application in which they have made a substantial investment. Whether they intended to do this when they purchased the system in the first place is a moot point. The article is quite right to point out that it is impossible to carry out a complete data transfer. In fact the one area where the transfer is particularly difficult is over the workflow and processes. Transferring clients, matters and postings should be very straightforward for any decent supplier these days but transferring workflow logic is very difficult and fraught with danger. As a result upgrading to another system (even one from the same group) will incur a huge amount of management time which would not have been anticipated or budgeted. It would also have been unnecessary had the underlying software not been issued with an effective end of life statement. I suspect that firms who have invested heavily in Evolution over the last two years after relying on the “no end of life” statements might be feeling particularly aggrieved.