In brief:
Most guidance on choosing legal software is written by the software vendors themselves, and it shows
The selection process matters more than the shortlist: firms rarely pick a bad system, but they very often pick the wrong system for how they actually work
UK firms have specific requirements that generic advice ignores, including SRA Accounts Rules support and data hosting questions
The biggest risks sit in the areas vendors talk about least: data migration, implementation, and what happens after go-live
A declared interest: Nexian is an Actionstep implementation partner. This guide is about how to run a selection, whatever you choose
Search for advice on choosing a practice management system and you will find plenty of guides. Read closely and you will notice a pattern: nearly all of them are published by software vendors, and by remarkable coincidence each one concludes that the author's product is the answer.
We have a commercial interest too, and unlike most of those guides we will state it plainly: Nexian implements Actionstep, and we think highly of it for the firms it suits. But our day job is not selling licences. It is getting firms live on new systems, and being called in when a selection has gone wrong. That work teaches you something the sales guides never mention: firms rarely choose a bad product. They choose products that are wrong for how their firm actually works, or they choose reasonably and then underestimate everything that comes after the contract is signed.
So this is a guide to running the selection itself. It applies whatever ends up on your shortlist.
The single most common selection mistake is starting with vendor demos. A good demo is a performance: it shows the product's best angles, on clean example data, run by someone who does it every day. Every system looks impressive in its own demo.
Before you watch a single one, map how your firm actually operates. Not how the office manual says it operates: how it really does. Where do new matters come from and who opens them? How does time get recorded, and by whom, and how much of it never gets recorded at all? Where do documents live? What does month-end billing actually involve? Which three processes cause the most swearing?
This does not need to be a consultancy engagement (though for larger firms a structured workflow analysis pays for itself). Even a fortnight of honest internal note-taking changes the conversation, because you stop asking vendors "what does your system do?" and start asking "show me how your system handles this specific thing we do forty times a week." The first question gets you a feature tour. The second gets you the truth.
Much of what ranks online for this topic is written for a global audience. UK firms have particular requirements, and they belong on your checklist from the start:
If your firm holds client money, the system's client accounting must support compliance with the SRA Accounts Rules, and your accounts team and reporting accountant need to be satisfied with how it does so. Ask vendors specifically how UK client account ledgers, reconciliations and breaches reporting work in their product, and ask to speak to a UK firm's cashier who uses it daily. A system built primarily for another market with UK compliance added later behaves differently from one designed around UK rules.
A conveyancing practice needs search integrations, forms and protocol workflows. A legal aid practice needs billing that copes with legal aid rates and submissions. A litigation practice needs court forms and key-date discipline. Generic "case management" claims tell you nothing; ask to see your highest-volume matter type handled end to end.
Ask where the system is hosted, under what terms, and what your firm's data protection obligations require. Your engagement terms and your insurers may both have views.
Email and Microsoft 365 integration is the big one, because that is where your fee earners live. Beyond that: your accounts package if accounting is not built in, digital dictation if you use it, identity and anti-money-laundering checks, and the practice-area tools mentioned above. For each, ask whether the integration is real and current, and ask to see it working, because "we integrate with that" covers everything from deep two-way sync to a marketing partnership.
Increasingly worth asking about, but with a sceptical ear. The useful question is not "does it have AI?" but "does the system expose our data through modern, secure interfaces so it can work with the AI tools we choose?" A system that keeps your data accessible keeps your options open; one that does not will limit what you can do later, whatever its brochure says.
Terminology in this market is slippery, and it hides a distinction that will shape your firm's next decade.
A genuinely browser-based system runs in a web browser from anywhere, is updated continuously by the vendor, and needs no servers or remote desktops on your side. By contrast, some products described as "cloud" are traditional desktop software running on someone else's servers, reached through a remote desktop session. That model works, but it carries different costs, a different user experience, and a different dependency on hosting infrastructure.
Neither answer is automatically right, but you should know exactly which you are buying, because it determines your firm's wider technology needs: what happens to your servers, how remote working feels, and how easily other tools connect. Ask the question directly: "Is this fully browser-based, or is it hosted desktop software?" The clarity of the answer is itself informative.
Here is where selections most often go wrong in practice, and it is the section of the sales process that gets the least airtime.
Your firm has years of matters, documents, ledgers and history in its current system. Moving that data is usually the hardest, riskiest part of the entire project. Questions to press on:
What exactly migrates? Open matters, closed matters, documents, emails, accounting history, time records? "We migrate your data" needs unpacking line by line.
Who does the work? The vendor, an implementation partner, or your own staff exporting spreadsheets? Who checks the migrated data, and against what?
What does your current supplier make difficult? Some systems export cleanly; others make leaving slow and expensive. Find out early, because it affects your timeline and your negotiating position.
What happens to what does not migrate? You will likely need continued read-only access to the old system or an archive strategy. Budget for it.
A vendor or partner who answers these questions specifically, with examples from firms like yours, is worth more than one with a prettier demo.
Two firms can buy the same system and have opposite experiences, because the implementation determines the outcome. When you evaluate, you are choosing an implementation approach and a partner as much as a product:
Who actually delivers it, the vendor's own team or a partner, and what is their track record with firms of your size and practice mix?
What is the methodology? Beware of both extremes: the "switch it on and off you go" approach that leaves configuration to you, and the never-ending build that tries to perfect everything before anyone goes live. A scoped, phased approach that gets you live on the essentials and improves from there tends to serve SME firms best
Who trains your people, and when? Adoption is where the value is. A system your staff route around is worse than the one you left.
What does support look like after go-live? Not just a helpdesk for faults: who helps you develop workflows, absorb product updates, and get more from the system in year two? Ask what proportion of their clients remain on an ongoing relationship, and why.
Finally, some process discipline that separates good selections from lucky ones:
Write your requirements down first, weighted by importance, from the workflow mapping above. Ten "must haves" and a longer "nice to have" list beats a hundred-line spreadsheet nobody reads.
Shortlist three, not eight. Serious evaluation of a PMS takes real hours from busy people. Depth on three beats superficial passes on eight.
Script the demos yourself. Send each vendor the same three scenarios drawn from your real work and make them drive it live. Refuse the standard tour.
Take references you choose, not the ones handed to you. Ask each vendor for UK firms of similar size and practice mix, then ask those firms the awkward questions: what surprised you, what would you do differently, what does it cost you annually in total?
Involve the people who will live in it. A selection made solely by partners produces a system fee earners and support staff resent. Include a cashier, a secretary and a junior fee earner in the evaluation and your adoption problem shrinks before it starts.
Decide with total cost and time in view. Licence fees are only part of it: implementation, migration, training, integrations and internal time all belong in the comparison, over a sensible horizon of several years. (We deliberately quote no figures here, because they vary enormously with firm size and scope. Insist on all-in proposals so you compare like with like.)
Choosing a practice management system is really three decisions wearing one coat: what your firm needs (which takes internal honesty), which product fits it (which takes disciplined evaluation), and who will get you there safely (which takes diligence on implementation and migration). The firms that end up happy are almost always the ones that spent proper effort on the first and third, where the vendors' guides spend the least ink.
If your firm is starting this journey and wants help mapping how you work before the demos begin, that structured workflow analysis is exactly what we do, and it is deliberately independent of whether you ever buy anything through us. And yes, if Actionstep turns out to be the right fit, we will happily tell you why we rate it. We will also tell you if it is not.
Getting the wider picture in order first? Our Legal Modern Workplace whitepaper covers how practice management fits alongside Microsoft 365, security and AI for a modern UK firm. [Download the whitepaper] or [get in touch] to talk it through.
A practice management system (PMS) is the core software a law firm runs on: matter records, time recording, billing, client accounting, document storage and workflow in one place. In the UK the category usually includes support for compliance with the SRA Accounts Rules where firms hold client money.
It varies with firm size, data volume and scope, but for an SME firm a realistic range is several months from decision to go-live, with data migration and training usually the pacing items. Be sceptical of any proposal that promises a complex migration in a few weeks.
Insist the vendor works through scenarios you provide from your own practice, live in the product, rather than delivering their standard tour. How the system handles your highest-volume matter type end to end tells you more than any feature list.
Data migration (what moves, who verifies it), under-scoped implementation, and poor adoption by staff. All three are addressable if they are evaluated as seriously as the software itself.
Not necessarily. A disciplined internal process, honest workflow mapping and well-chosen references take a firm a long way. Independent help earns its keep for larger firms, complex migrations, or where partners cannot agree on requirements.
nexian.co.uk/legal-modern-workplace-whitepaper
Or get in touch with the team if you would like to talk through where your firm is on its technology journey.