Systems that run professional services firms

Law firms, accountancy practices, insurance brokers, recruitment agencies and architecture practices across the UK run systems like these, from a high street practice with a few offices to a national team running a group action or a specialist insurance scheme. Nearer home they include the firms in Colchester, Chelmsford and Ipswich. Most have a partner or director who remembers the system going in and a practice manager who keeps it running, and the question is the same for all of them: how do we move it forward without a missed deadline, a late pay run or an unbilled month?

The office is in Colchester, and the firm can be anywhere in the UK. The work runs remotely, and a firm in Essex, Suffolk or London gets a site visit when the work needs one. The regional page says how the local side works.

Most professional firms buy their core package: the practice software, the broking platform, the candidate database, the design tools. The system these pages describe is the one the firm built for the part the package never did, and it comes in two generations.

The Old Guard was written between the early 2000s and about 2015. The case management system is a Windows client grown out of an Access database, or a bought package customised until it could not be upgraded. The claimant system is an ASP.NET Web Forms site built for a first big action. The accountancy practice's deadline and workflow database lives in Microsoft Access with a workbook beside it. The broker's scheme rating system is Visual Basic 6 with a web quote form added later. The agency's pay-and-bill program runs on the .NET Framework, and the architecture practice's project and fee database is often FileMaker or Access on the studio's own machines.

The New Legacy is the same system built from about 2016 by an agency or a freelancer: a client portal, an online quote, a timesheet app, a browser resourcing screen, or a build in Power Apps or a chain of automations. Since 2023 some firms have tried again with an AI builder and stalled at the part with the rules in it. Newer, and just as hard to change.

The people who use the system reach it from where they are: the fee earner at court, the architect on site, the consultant with a client, the claimant signing on a phone. The pieces a deadline depends on come out of the system rather than a spreadsheet: the schedule for the court, the quarterly updates for Making Tax Digital clients, the insurer's monthly bordereau, the Tuesday pay run, the stage invoice. The rules the firm runs on, the key dates, the rating tables, the pay and charge rates, the fee stages, come out of the code into screens the firm can see and change. And the whole thing comes off servers and databases whose support dates have passed, onto supported versions with a backup that has been restored on purpose, while the screens the firm knows keep working until each is replaced.

Once the system is safe to change, AI takes the reading off the desk as well: the letter from the other side drafted into an attendance note, the client's records sorted against the job's checklist, the proposal form read into a quote, the photographed timesheet matched to its assignment, the client email that asks for work outside the appointment flagged before it is done for nothing. Each system page works out the time that gives back at its own volumes.

The old system stays on throughout. Each piece is added beside it, on the same data, and the firm switches when the new screen is better than the old one.