Case study
Seven systems in 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 starting position
The firm was not failing. It was growing, profitable and busy — which is exactly the condition in which operational debt accumulates fastest, because every new problem gets solved by adding a tool or a person rather than by changing the machine.
Four platforms each held part of the truth. The CRM knew about leads but not matters. The practice management system knew about matters but not what had been promised during the sale. An automation layer ran court-day obligations that nobody had examined in two years. Invoicing lived somewhere else again, reconciled by hand every cycle.
7
Production systems delivered
6 months
From first commit to the last cutover beginning
4
Rented platforms displaced
How it was sequenced
One system at a time, each in production before the next began. That constraint is the reason it worked. A firm cannot absorb seven changes at once, and a programme that delivers everything at the end delivers nothing for months and then asks for trust it has not earned.
The order was chosen by dependency, not by enthusiasm. Revenue operations first, because every downstream system needed to know what had been sold. Case management second, because it carried a decade of history that had to be migrated before anything could be built on top of it.
The seven systems
- Lead Tracker — every inquiry, call, quote and payment, from the first ad click to the signed agreement
- Case Tracker — matters, court dates, orders, documents and billable time, carrying ten years of migrated history
- Promptu — a scheduling platform the firm owns, replacing a per-seat rental
- SMS Hub — every text to and from the firm's main line, stored once and routed to whichever system needs it
- Payments Hub — five payment rails ingested into one ledger, replacing weekly manual allocation
- Case Analytics — what a case actually costs to run, by month of engagement
- MatterCounts — billing and invoicing, brought in-house by the firm's own development team
The firm now owns every system it runs on. That was the point — not the individual applications, but ending the condition where the business is a tenant inside its own operations.
What we would flag to another firm
Two things consistently cost more than expected. The first is history: migrating a decade of records is not a data task, it is a series of decisions about what was true at the time, and only the firm can make them. The second is the cutover period, where the old system and the new one both run and every disagreement between them has to be explained before anything can be switched off.
Neither is avoidable, and a proposal that does not budget for them is not a serious proposal.
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