It’s interesting isn’t it, I was around (but not involved with) the Allens implementation and my understanding was that it was delivered a little late and mainly on budget in just over 12 months. I think that’s pretty impressive for a large multi office, multi country firm with the change of a mission critical system. I know if I was managing partner I’d be happy with that result. It will be interesting to see if the Blakes implementation can achieve the same. At the same time I understand that the Gadens implementation (notably missing from the list of customers provided) was a complete disaster that resulted in the dismissal of the IT department and is still having ramifications for the firm. Now this is all hearsay for me but after 3 or 4 people tell you the same thing, you start to think that there must be some fire behind the smoke, especially when the vendor doesn’t list one of their customers. Be that as it may, the interesting question for me is how a big firm decides on a practice management system, now that Elite appear to have gotten their act together after rushing out their new technology 4 or 5 years ago, because there look like there are only 2 options. in the market these days. It’s not like it’s either product is going to give a strategic advantage to the user. They are basically time, billing and accounting systems at the core, which is fundamentally a back office function. The decision is typically made by the finance department. Anyway, with the pedigree of both products they probably have most of the functions covered here, one way or the other. Let’s face it, firms are going to have a system like this for 10 or 15 years or longer these days. You make a decision, you spend 1 or 2 years of heartache implementing. You get through that and then you sit on your hands for a couple of years because you haven’t got any time or energy left after the trauma of implementation. Then the system gradually settles down and you start to fine tune and use some of the functions that you didn’t know about or modules that you bought up front when you were enthusiastic but ran out of time to implement. 5 or 6 years later you are gradually ironing out all the kinks and actually understanding what the product is about and maybe even liking it. So then you start to use it fully and after 10 years it’s embedded in all of your processes and the thought of changing it still recalls the pain from the original implementation. I doubt if either Allens or Blakes would have changed systems had Aderant decided not to rationalise their product set and keep going forward with Keystone. When you write off the initial investment 10 or 15 years the difference between the 2 products has to be minimal. So how to you decide? Lowering costs? Difficult to see a big difference between the two here as the really heavy usage is in the back office. Better productivity in the front office? I believed the “if you get every lawyer to record one more unit every day the system pays for itself in 2 months” spiel 25 years ago but what I have learnt is that there is a difference between recording time and billing it. Successful lawyers are good at billing. And both have a wealth of financial information available albeit it generally locked away. Driving down operational costs? Both have workflow engines in their infancy and generally the profession is still an early adopter in this area. Technology stack? Aderant align with Microsoft and Elite go proprietary and state they have the web high ground. I’d argue that technology is secondary consideration anyway. Good reference sites? They both can claim some impressive customers. Vendor vision/capability? They both seem to have a good handle on the customer needs going forward and the management seems stable in both. Both are part of bigger organisations so you would doubt either is going to disappear. I wonder how you decide? Which one has the UI that you like?? Wow, what a long post. That’s what happens when you are working away from home and have had a few wines and there is only crap on telly. Hic! Good night. PS. In a tree by the brook there’s a songbird who sings sometimes all of our thoughts are misgiven.