TAKING CENTRE STAGE

In today’s IT market, there is a very simple calculus: get big; get niche – or get out. At Acora, we have chosen the second option, focusing on clients either with a high enterprise value relative to their physical corporate footprint, or who are high-value users of time. As a result, a significant proportion of our business is in the legal sector – we are currently working with a third of the UK Top 50 firms – and have identified Legal as one of our biggest growth areas over the coming years.

In our experience, senior leadership teams in law firms can, understandably, be reluctant to get into the detail of IT services. They often have a perception that IT companies just want to throw technology at them; when what they are really interested in is how IT can drive efficiency, productivity and revenue.

As a services company, we bring them a proprietary methodology based around people and processes, in which technology is the enabler, not the main driver. The user experience is central to our approach: we are no longer relying on conventional service level agreements (SLAs) as the sole metric of IT success, but starting to measure the perception of the people who actually consume our services. It is straightforward (although not simple!) and means that we are constantly assessing the impact of our services and other IT ingredients on the business as a whole, not just the IT function.

We will be discussing this, and more, when we make our appearance at the British Legal Technology Forum in about a month’s time. I am delighted to have been invited to speak at this highly regarded event, which this year takes place on 12 October at Old Billingsgate in London. It is a great opportunity, and I am looking forward to meeting many of the forward thinkers in Legal Tech.