Hofmeyr, the largest law firm in Southern Africa, is implementing an integrated business and accounting system - known as FutureLaw - in its offices countrywide. The system will substantially improve the legal firms billing and disbursements, as well as provide its legal professionals with immediate desktop and remote access to critical business information.
The project management and implementation was undertaken by Logical, Datatec`s business solutions company, and Lex Technologies who have many years` experience in information systems custom-made for the legal industry.
Mark Heyink, head of the electronic commerce department at Hofmeyr, explains that the need for a new system was brought about by the new millennium and the recent merger with four other law firms: Herbsteins in Cape Town, Gihwala Abercrombie in Athlone, Cluver Markotter in Stellenbosch and Walkers in Cape Town.
FutureLaw replaces the diverse MIS legacy systems formerly used by the firms that recently merged with Hofmeyr.
Following the merger, Hofmeyr needed an integrated business and accounting system that met the diverse needs of all firms in the Group and used the latest technology to assure continuity.
Its previous systems were assessed and found to be not only inadequate but also unable to integrate with each other and take advantage of current technologies such as e-mail and the Internet. Most were also not Y2K compliant.
"Other important reasons for changing were to allow our legal professionals access to all pertinent information to their matters at their desktops, thus decentralising certain functions which had previously been performed centrally in the accounts departments. Professionals also needed to be able to remotely access information through the Internet on their notebooks," explains Heyink.
The firm`s immediate requirements focused on an invoicing and disbursement control system to record amounts disbursed on behalf of each client.
"We had been using an outdated time sheet system to record the amount of time each professional spent on a matter, and disbursements were often recorded late resulting in a necessity to resubmit accounts and consequential delays in recovering monies due by clients," he says.
"In addition, many expenses and lawyers` time were not billed at all due to inefficiencies in the systems. This made performance comparisons difficult and productivity and profitability suffered."
The system has been successfully installed in Hofmeyr`s Sandton offices and is presently being rolled out in the Western Cape offices.
FutureLaw consists of three distinct components: Front Office, Back Office and Dynamics. The professionals and their secretaries use the Front Office, while the accounting personnel use Back Office and Dynamics. The Front Office is a browser-look-and-feel business system written in VB6, while the Back Office is written in Dexterity and has a Dynamics flavour. Finally, the world-renowned Great Plains Dynamics C/S+ for SQL Server provides the accounting functionality.
In conjunction with the core Dynamics modules, Logical developed the "Back Office" component that acts as an interface between the "Front Office" and the Dynamics accounting system.
The module has a two-fold function. Firstly, it tracks, and reports on, the details of Hofmeyr`s clients` business, trust and investment accounts. Secondly, it provides a single and uniform interface for the capture of all legal accounting transactions.
The integration between the VB "Front Office" system and Dexterity`s "Back Office" is seamless and data flows in both directions. The disbursements captured in "Back Office" are immediately made available to the "Front Office" for invoicing to the client using MS Word integration.
Similarly, the integration between "Back Office" and the Dynamics modules is also totally seamless. Data captured in "Back Office" is immediately available in the Receivables, Payables and General Ledgers.
Reports are generated in real-time for partners, management and fee earners based on branch, department, team and practice. Using best-of-breed reporting tools the staff can create and disseminate performance reports to all users.
The Logical project team used the Microsoft Solution framework as a methodology to manage the development life cycle. Says Graham van Zijl, director ERP and Financial Solutions at Logical: "Logical developed FutureLaw using Visual Basic 6 and the latest n-tier approach recommended by Microsoft. This separates the business logic from the presentation and database layers and is implemented using Microsoft Transaction Server."
The FutureLaw interface was designed in line with the "Outlook style" look and feel, which provides for ease of use and minimum training overhead.
Bernard Koenig of Lex Technologies explains that the FutureLaw application is capable of tracking the firm`s contacts and relating them to each other, and to the matters that the professionals are involved in. One of the most attractive features is the ability to create one entity in the system and assign various roles to it.
"One of the firm`s vendors may also be a client at some time in the future. It is vital to be aware of the role each entity plays in this complex business," says Koenig.
"This allows anyone in the company to have up-to-date information on the firm`s current clients and avoid any conflicts of interest, which the firm might incur in taking on another client. It is also uses a sophisticated search engine which allows for multilingual and alias searches."
FutureLaw allows professionals to capture the time they have spent working on a matter. A further enhancement of the system was to provide access to the Internet using ASP Pages. This allows the professionals to update their time from anywhere.
Says Brian Mulvaney, financial solutions manager at Logical: "FutureLaw is able to produce an invoice for the client based on this information. The information on the invoices is automatically posted to Dynamics tables through stored procedures."
The integration between the two applications was done using Dexterity, Dynamics` development environment. "By using a financial application that has proved to be a technological leader for a number of years, Logical ensures that the solution for Hofmeyr can be maintained on current technologies."
The MIS will be Y2K compliant and ensure uniformity of accounting practices and performance measurement. In the initial tests, the application showed a 100% performance increase over a traditional client/server application run over a 64k leased line.
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