Canadian Lawyer

20 S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 7 w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m avid Mills rattles off a list of software his firm uses in its five practice areas, at least one for each, plus overall office manage- ment software, and then there's the bevvy of other tech tools out there, some of which his Toronto law firm Mills and Mills LLP has tried. And he's not happy. Frustrated is more like it. With a complement of 20 lawyers, plus staff, his firm is no longer con- sidered small. And hovering in that in-between stage can be like that young teenager for whom childhood acces- sories are no longer appropriate but those made for the full-on adult are financially out of reach. "And then, in addition to that, you have to think about the overall and what does everybody need," Mills says, pointing to the basic software such as Outlook, Word, Excel and more special- ized tools for docketing, accounting and file management. "Broadly speaking, you've got all of those areas, and in each of them there's no shortage of options companies are trying to sell you." His firm did a major software roll- out for a file management and docketing system, but it concludes that it wasn't well managed and it just didn't attract the desired buy-in within the firm, says Mills. After 18 months, the firm gave up on it and went back to the drawing board. When the firm thought it had found ade- quate replacement and was on the verge of implementing it, Mills recognized some warning signs and pulled the plug. "We're still looking to get the right case management software. The chal- lenge is there seems to be a number of options out there that are designed for smaller and mid-sized firms and solo firms that we seem to be pushing the edge for, [but] we're too big for some of them," he says. "If you're looking at the smaller companies, you're looking at spending maybe $70,000 or maybe $80,000 instead of $250,000, but we've had trouble making those ones really work for us. It's a real challenge. We bang our head up against the wall say- ing: 'There has to be the right thing out there that just works the way it's sup- posed to.' And, of course, every com- pany that has software tells you that they have it. But that hasn't been our experience yet." It would be much simpler, he adds, if the firm was new and starting from scratch, but the old files need to be L AW O F F I C E M A N A G E M E N T By Marg. Bruineman PETE RYAN Tech for small law Investing in tech has traditionally been a big challenge for small law firms, but new, low-cost solutions may be about to change that D

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