One firm. Seven systems. Six months.

A Chicago family law firm running on a legacy CRM, a rented scheduling tool, a third-party automation layer and a large amount of manual reconciliation. No single system knew what a case cost, what had been promised to a client, or what was due in court tomorrow.

The firm ran its pipeline across a legacy CRM, spreadsheets and people's memory. Follow-up depended on someone remembering. Ad spend could not be tied to signed clients at all.

The legal side of the firm: matters, court dates, orders, documents, billable time. It had to absorb a decade of records from two systems before it could replace either of them.

Scheduling looks like the easiest thing on this list. It is the one where the edge cases are most expensive, because every one of them is a client who could not book a time.

Client texting ran through a third-party automation platform that relayed messages onward and kept no durable record. Nobody could answer what had been said to a client, or when.

Card, eCheck, bank transfer, peer-to-peer and paper cheques all arrived differently, and were matched to clients by hand every week — by someone whose job was not data entry.

The firm quoted fixed fees against a blended average cost per case. The average was real, the arithmetic was correct, and it had been drawn from the wrong population.

Invoicing ran on a general-purpose work platform the firm had long outgrown, with the ledger reconciled by hand every cycle. Bringing it in-house was the last piece of the programme, and the one that had to coexist with everything already built.