We’re a people business – so why did we spend the better part of three years, and a few million pounds, building our own software? Chris Setford, co-CEO of Setfords, on the road to rolling out Halo, and why a law firm decided to become a technology company too.
Let me start where we always start, long before we get on to software, systems and technology. We’re a people business. We always have been, and we always will be. What clients come to us for, in the end, is judgement. And judgement sits with people, not machines. That’s the part of this job you can’t hand to a computer.
We’ve invested heavily in that idea. In the early years we did things on a shoestring. Guy and I, and a handful of others, wore an awful lot of hats between us. As we grew, we were able to bring in specialists: leaders across accounts, business development, marketing and compliance, and senior lawyers in non-fee-earning roles whose whole job is to make sure our 650 lawyers can get on and do brilliant work, properly supported.
But even the best people are only as good as the tools you put in their hands. And for years, the tools were the problem.
We’ve always had to be a technology firm
Being a platform, we’ve never had the luxury of ignoring technology. When Guy started Setfords in 2006, the first thing he did was go and find the best system money could buy off the shelf – a case management platform, with digital dictation and the rest built around it. It’s easy to forget how forward-thinking that was. Twenty years doesn’t sound like long, but typewriters were still commonplace. Guy was already setting things up in the cloud.
For a long time, off-the-shelf served us well. But over the years we kept running into the same wall. The systems were good – they just weren’t right. They weren’t built for a platform firm, with lawyers working remotely and support centralised in one place. They didn’t give us what we needed to improve our operational efficiencies or introduce the right processes to make our lawyers’ lives easier and deliver a better service to clients.
So we decided to build it ourselves
We started building out a technical team: cyber first, then web developers, then data people, then engineers, AI engineers, project managers and business analysts. To build what we wanted, we had to become a technology company – and somewhere along the way, that’s exactly what we did. Today we now run three business under one roof: the law firm, a technology company and a data company.
Over three years, that team built our own platform. It’s been hard-won and they deserve every bit of credit. We call what they’ve created a legal intelligence platform, because we don’t believe calling it a case management system does it justice. To everyone here though, it’s just Halo. We went live ten weeks ago.
What it actually changes
Here’s what we were really after. Because we own the whole thing, we now have a flywheel. Our lawyers and our operations people tell us what they need; our delivery team – sitting in-house just one floor above – builds it; and what used to take a third-party provider months now takes us days. That’s not a turn of phrase. Ten weeks after going live, we were on version twenty-two of the software. Plenty of technology companies manage one or two releases a year.
You see it in the small things, which are usually the things that matter most to a busy lawyer. Take DocuSign. On our old systems it was cumbersome, so most people defaulted to hard-copy post. We rebuilt it so a lawyer can go from document to signed-by-the-client in three clicks. We didn’t mandate it – we just made it good enough that the obvious thing to do was to use it. Use of DocuSign has gone up roughly tenfold in ten weeks. That’s less paper, faster transactions and happier clients.
Or take the dashboard our lawyers see when they log in each morning. When we spoke to supplier we were being offered something that they’d built for a hundred firms, or two hundred. We had the luxury of building something that works for ours. That means our lawyers see the information they need every time they load up Halo rather than a load of irrelevant information.
What it cost, and what comes next
Halo cost millions of pounds, and the better part of three years but we’ve never once questioned the investment, because of what it lets us do from here.
The exciting part isn’t what Halo does today – it’s what the team can do over the next twenty-two releases. It’s the automation we’ll introduce, the AI we’ll integrate, the time we’ll save, and what all of that means for our lawyers, their clients and the way legal services get delivered.
We didn’t build Halo because we wanted to be a software company. Perhaps ironically though, by concentrating on what people in our profession actually want and need we have become a software company in the process. And maybe that’s the way it should be. Software built by lawyer for lawyers.
For further information please contact media@setfords.co.uk
