Nishith Desai Associates Clocks Lawyers' Time With Elite 3E

Information technology has been adopted by a cross section of verticals; however, law firms have rarely been heard to be aggressive adopters of IT. Nishith Desai Associates, a Mumbai-based tax and law firm, in its effort to be innovative, has adopted a time management software that bills clients of the law firm based on the amount of time spent on the case by lawyers serving in the firm. The passion for technology at Nishith Desai Associates stems from none other than the CEO and founder himself – Nishith Desai.

“As a matter of fact, I studied global law firms for over four-and-a-half years and identified IT as a major competitive and differentiating factor,” says Desai.

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Excel Sheets - ‘Timeslips’ - Elite 3E

The law firm was traditionally using Excel sheets to bill clients. “In 1998, we were using Microsoft Excel to capture the time spent by our lawyers on cases,” says Milind Mundankar, Head IT, Nishith Desai Associates. Finally, all the Excel sheets were consolidated for billing clients. The firm was searching for a tool that would automate this entire process of consolidation and billing.

After evaluating a host of products in the market, the company selected Timeslips, a product of Sage US, an American IT firm. “Using Timeslips, every lawyer could track his own time by feeding the data. This data was sent to the client after getting scrutinised by the respective project leader. Thus, the client was well aware of the particulars for which he was billed. Basically, the entire process got automated. Previously, the use of Excel sheets needed a high level of manual intervention,” says Mundankar.

As Nishith Desai Associates expanded its operations globally, the requirements grew manifold, which the already-in-use Timeslips software was unable to accommodate. The challenge was that separate database files were required from remote locations to calculate final amounts involved in transactions. The executives operating from those locations maintained their data on separate files and send them to the Mumbai office. Subsequently, all the files were consolidated before sending them out again for final clearance. This was proving to be a time-consuming process.

In this context, NDA initiated the hunt for software, which would fit its changing requirements. “At the back-end, we were moving towards implementing a balanced scorecard system. This was another prompter to adopt sophisticated software that would also enable the implementation of the balanced scorecard,” says Mundankar.

After a thorough study of the products available in the market, NDA zeroed in on Elite 3E from Thomson Reuters. “There was immense research that went into the selection process for the software,” says Mundankar. There was a specific set of functionalities that NDA was looking out for. The hunt was for a system that would offer a mix of features like Time and Billing, Financial Accounting, Conflict Check, Risk Management etc. “We started looking for Practice Management Systems, Business Management Software etc and finally selected Elite 3E,” says Mundankar.

A Lengthy Implementation Process

Elite 3E is a product that is widely used in the US by large law firms. “We did go through their case studies to understand how exactly people use the system and then finally compared it with our applications,” says Mundankar. Being a small firm, we had MIS reports that had to be generated. It took about two months to finalise the product. The cost of the product was approximately $200,000.
The implementation process was lengthy, however, a task force adequately constituted with employees from the required departments completed the roll-out successfully.

The task force included senior associates, partners of the firm, and employees from the technology and finance department. The implementation was divided into two stages, the first stage was about understanding the current system and the second comprised data migration. “We started off in the month of February 2008 and the implementation was completed by October 2008,” says Mundankar.

The most important aspect about the implementation involved the finance department. All the closing balances had to be integrated with the Elite 3E system. The uninterrupted reception of current services by associates/ lawyers was the most important consideration while running the implementation.

Elite 3E Centralises Operations

The system was huge and thus, there was a set of challenges that had to be overcome for successful deployment. The first being that of data migration. The vendor predicted that training employees at Nishith Desai Associates would be a big challenge too; however, to their surprise, the employees were able to grasp the system fast. “This is because of our prior experience of working on similar systems since 1998,” says Mundankar.

The biggest advantage of Elite 3E was that it lent a centralised format to operations. The financial accounting and time and billing functions were centralised, which helped in report generation. Apart from that, remote connectivity proved to be a big advantage. The Internet connection enabled employees to connect to any office location anywhere around the globe. The associate profile can now be accessed remotely and data related to time, weekly reports can be keyed in.

In Timeslips, the tracking of pending collection from clients was done manually; however, Elite 3E has completely automated this process. The application can set reminders for pending collections after the bill is issued.

The conflict check system is a huge plus. It is an essential feature for a law firm. It basically runs a check and goes through the entire trail of clients that the law firm has represented before. This feature makes sure that Nishith Desai Associates is not fighting for clients they fought against in the past.

View from the Top

“Elite 3E allows us to measure every aspect of our business. Whether it is customer management issues or processes or the people working in our firm, we can keep a tab on all these factors. The software prepares financial statements focusing on about five to six areas,” says Desai.

Even now, most law firms do their financial accounting on cash basis. Elite 3E allows Nishith Desai Associates to do it on cash basis, management basis, accrual basis, financial year basis, calendar year basis, quarter-on-quarter (Q-o-Q) basis etc. This gives the law firm a holistic view of its operations. It also helps to shape the strategy accordingly and provides a bird’s eye view of all the different departments at one click of the mouse.