Legal
Law firms need a CRM that thinks in matters, not contacts. We build systems with conflict checking, time recording integration, client money controls, and SRA compliance designed into the data model from the start.
Sector Challenges
Generic CRMs have no concept of conflict checking. Firms end up running manual searches across contacts, companies, and matters, risking missed connections and SRA principle 7 breaches.
Law firms work on matters, not deals. When your CRM forces everything into a contact-centric model, the relationship between parties, matters, and documents becomes impossible to navigate.
Fee earners need to record time against matters without leaving their working environment. Disconnected time recording means lost billable hours, inaccurate invoicing, and frustrated partners at month-end.
SRA Accounts Rules, client money handling, professional conduct obligations, and residual balance management require structured workflows that generic CRM platforms simply do not offer.
What Goes Wrong
Most CRMs were designed for businesses that sell products to contacts, not law firms that take instructions on matters. These are the six patterns UK law firms describe most often when their CRM stops supporting practice growth.
A fee earner types a new client name into a search bar across Outlook, the matter database, and a spreadsheet. If one of those systems is out of date, a conflict is missed. SRA Principle 7 and Code 6.1 obligations cannot be evidenced by a "we always do it" statement.
Fee earners record time at the end of the week, from memory, in a separate system. Lost billable time across a mid-size firm runs to six figures annually, and client bills are challenged when the narrative does not match the work.
SRA Accounts Rules require five-weekly reconciliations with precise residual balance tracking. Excel-based reconciliation is fragile, error-prone, and invites material SRA findings on routine inspection.
A litigation matter involves opponent, opponent solicitor, expert, counsel, witnesses, court, and client. Flattening these into "contacts linked to one matter" loses the relationship structure fee earners actually work with.
KYC, source-of-funds, AML risk assessment, engagement letter, CDD refresh dates: all captured in separate forms, often in paper folders, never queryable. AML supervisors find this pattern in firm after firm.
Matters are "open" indefinitely because nobody owns closure. Retention periods never start counting, UK GDPR obligations quietly breach, and the firm carries indefinite data liability for matters that ended years ago.
What We Build
Automated conflict of interest searches across all parties, matters, and historical records. Structured results with risk flagging and partner sign-off workflows, and a full audit trail of every check.
Matters as first-class entities with linked parties, documents, time entries, and billing. Track matter stages, key dates, fee earner assignments, and budgets in one view.
Record time against matters directly from the CRM or from the fee earner desktop. Integrates with your existing billing software or provides standalone time capture with approval workflows.
Monitor compliance status across the practice: client account reconciliations, practising certificate renewals, CPD tracking, AML CDD refresh dates, and conduct risk indicators.
Give clients secure access to matter updates, document sharing, and communication logs. Reduce email traffic and maintain a clear audit trail of all client interactions.
Compliance in Practice
UK law firms answer to the SRA, to the Legal Ombudsman for complaints, to the ICO for data protection, and to HMRC and supervisory authorities for AML. A bespoke CRM cannot replace the firm’s compliance function, but it should make five specific obligations cheaper to meet daily.
Client account postings flow through structured workflows with dual authorisation where required, residual balance tracking, and automatic generation of the five-weekly reconciliation. The COFA dashboard shows outstanding balances and breaches in one view rather than being assembled from spreadsheets the night before an inspection.
Every new instruction triggers a conflict search across all parties, matters, and historical records. Results are risk-rated and routed to the appropriate partner for sign-off. The full chain of searches, decisions, and waivers is stored against the matter so the firm can evidence compliance with Principle 7 and Code 6.1.
Client onboarding enforces CDD as a workflow: identity verification, source of funds, AML risk assessment, PEP screening, and engagement letter. Each step is timestamped with the fee earner and reviewer. CDD refresh dates are tracked per client risk rating and enforced before further instructions can proceed.
Matter data retention is calculated from closure date plus the relevant limitation period, with automatic archival and deletion when the period expires. Subject access and erasure requests are fulfilled from a single dashboard, with privilege claims properly flagged rather than disclosed.
Complaints are recorded against the matter with acknowledgement, substantive response, and escalation deadlines tracked automatically. The eight-week regulatory clock runs in the CRM, and the firm’s annual diversity and complaints return is produced from the data rather than compiled by hand.
Regulatory Compliance
UK law firms operate under stringent regulatory obligations. Your CRM must support professional conduct requirements, not create additional compliance risk, and it should make COFA and COLP oversight easier rather than harder.
SRA Accounts Rules compliance with structured workflows for client money handling, reconciliation tracking, and residual balance management.
UK GDPR data protection built in, with client consent tracking, data retention schedules aligned to limitation periods, and automated subject access request handling.
Legal Services Act obligations supported through practice-wide compliance monitoring, including reserved activities tracking and authorisation status management.
Investment Guidance
Every firm is different, but there are clear market bands for what a purpose-built practice management CRM costs. The ranges below reflect typical investment for a UK-led build with SRA compliance, client money controls, and UK GDPR baked in. For firms with 1 to 5 fee earners running standard transactional work, off-the-shelf practice management platforms like LEAP, Clio, or Actionstep are usually the better commercial answer, and we will tell you so during discovery.
Small firms, single practice area
A single focused workflow: conflict check engine, matter intake portal, AML CDD tracker, or client portal. One to two integrations with an existing practice management or accounting system. For firms replacing a specific spreadsheet process rather than a full case management system.
Established firms, 10-40 users
Full practice management CRM with matter management, conflict engine, time recording, CDD workflow, client portal, and three to five integrations (accounting, document management, email, e-signature, billing). Role-based permissions for fee earners, supervisors, and compliance officers.
Multi-office firms, 40+ users
Multi-office practice platform: departmental workflows for litigation, conveyancing, corporate, and private client; SRA Accounts Rules engine; COFA / COLP dashboards; automated regulatory reporting; and custom integrations with court systems, search providers, and specialist legal research tools.
Fixed-price build, with ongoing support and enhancement delivered on a monthly retainer. Indicative ranges for a UK-led build with SRA-supervised firm requirements. Actual cost depends on integration count, practice area complexity, and the scope of your existing compliance framework. See full pricing detail.
Questions Answered
The questions UK law firms ask us most often during discovery. If yours is not here, book a discovery call and we will answer it directly.
LEAP, Clio, Actionstep, and similar platforms are well suited to firms whose workflow fits the product. A bespoke CRM makes sense when your practice areas, client service model, or compliance obligations do not map cleanly onto the off-the-shelf product, or when your firm has grown past the point where the product supports it without costly customisation. Most firms under 10 fee earners on mainstream transactional work should stay on off-the-shelf.
The conflict engine searches across all parties (clients, opponents, related entities), all matters (open, closed, archived), and fuzzy-matches on company numbers, aliases, and group structures. Results are risk-rated and routed to a partner for sign-off. Every check, decision, and waiver is timestamped and stored against the matter, producing a full audit trail for SRA inspection.
Yes. Client money workflows enforce dual authorisation where required, residual balance tracking, and five-weekly reconciliations. The COFA dashboard shows outstanding balances, unreconciled items, and breaches in one view. We are not a replacement for your legal cashier, but we make their life materially easier and reduce material findings on inspection.
Yes. We have migrated from LEAP, Clio, Actionstep, Tikit P4W, Quill, Osprey, and bespoke legacy systems. Migration includes matter records, parties, documents, time entries, billing history, and compliance records. Most firms run their old system in parallel for 4 to 8 weeks while fee earners transition.
You do. The code is delivered to your GitHub or GitLab organisation under a permissive licence, the database runs in your cloud account (AWS, Azure, or GCP), and there is no vendor lock-in. We offer ongoing support contracts, but you are free to engage any competent development team to maintain the platform after handover.
Matter retention is calculated from closure date plus the relevant limitation period (typically 6 years for contract, 12 years for deeds, longer for wealth and probate). The CRM enforces retention automatically, archiving matters at the right point and deleting on schedule. Subject access requests are fulfilled from a single dashboard with privilege protection flagged properly.
Yes. Typical integrations include legal accounting platforms (Xero, QuickBooks, Insight Legal, SOS Connect), time recording (Aderant, Elite 3E, OpenText Axcelerate), document management (iManage, NetDocuments, SharePoint), and e-signature (DocuSign, Adobe Sign). Integration complexity is the single largest cost driver.
Regulatory change is continuous, so the architecture is designed to make rule changes cheap to implement. Conflict rules, CDD workflows, reconciliation logic, and compliance dashboards are configuration rather than hard-coded logic. Most firms retain us on an ongoing support contract so regulatory change can be handled in days rather than waiting for a full release cycle.
Services
Bespoke CRM Development
CRM Consultancy
CRM Data Migration
CRM Integration
CRM Support & Maintenance
CRM Training
Legal CRM
Book a free discovery call. We will discuss your practice management needs, your SRA obligations, and whether a bespoke CRM is the right investment for your firm.
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