Case study: Linetime provide Gotelee Solicitors with a flexible, scalable solution to support long term growth
Objectives:Gotelee Solicitors LLP is a full-service law firm with offices operating in five different towns in Suffolk. The firm is comprised of 109 staff and has a well-established presence throughout the county acting for private individuals, families, businesses and organisations.
During 2019, Gotelee Solicitors realised the current practice management system and associated IT infrastructure was not meeting the needs of its business. To address this, Gotelee decided to conduct a full review of the IT infrastructure alongside legal technology providers to deliver 4 clear goals:
Improve time efficiencies for all staff, with a particular focus on fee earners.
Improve communications between offices, staff and clients.
Minimise a reliance on paper and associated costs, including printing and postage while freeing desks of files (paper-lite).
Implement a high-performance IT infrastructure, with continued remote hosting of servers.
Reviewing the market:
Gotelee Solicitors recruited the IT specialist skills of David Baskerville of Baskerville Drummond to perform and drive the review process. Baskerville Drummond spent time investigating the market, spending time with various vendors before providing a preferred list to Gotelee, which included both Oosha as a hosting solution and Linetime as a legal business management system.
Gotelee was introduced to both parties and for IT Manager, Chris Winterburn, there was clearly a working relationship between Oosha and Linetime that others lacked. Chris comments, “Like any firm, we are very conscious of selecting providers who can service the needs of firms now and in the future. It was apparent to us from the outset that both providers clearly had a strong proposition. That was proven with many of our performance related questions being addressed within our initial interactions with both Oosha and Linetime.”
Once past the first stage of selection, Gotelee identified key features that would be required in order to achieve its strategic goals. First, was a need for easily designed business processes and workflows to manage the fee earning and accounting functions of the business. Second, were rich feature requirements, including automated time recording, improved financial management with faster invoicing and payment functionality built in. In parallel, to deliver against fee earner requirements, the system would need powerful integrations with postcode lookup, AML providers, electronic signatures and conveyancing search providers. Importantly, the system needed to be flexible and simple to use.
