emailfacebookinstagrammenutwitterweiboyoutube

How to achieve returns on your legal-software investment

Chris Pucci from Osprey Approach highlights the value of carefully cultivating technology solutions and transforming them from costs to high-return investments.

Chris Pucci, sales director|Osprey Approach|

Firstly, it’s important to address that software and technology is typically seen as a cost by many law firms. Like other functional, necessary bills for a business, legal software is seen as an additional spend in revenue. But to achieve returns, a practice and case management software (PCMS) needs to be recognised as an investment that enables and drives financial benefit.

Just like a valued fee-earner, a PCMS provides opportunities such as improving productivity, increasing revenue, winning new business, and improving profitability. And like any employee, PCMS needs dedicated goals, time, and resources to ensure it delivers on a firm’s objectives and expectations.

Setting clear objectives

To understand if your legal software is yielding a return, you should first decide what you want it to achieve. Firms that realise the biggest return on their investment are those with clear expectations, defined measurables and an overall goal. Without knowing what you want the PCMS to achieve you’ll never know if it’s been successful. Whether you’re looking to implement a new solution, or reviewing your existing system, you need to set goals and objectives to monitor success. Ask yourself the following questions:

  1. What are your current and future business goals?
  2. What challenges are you currently facing?
  3. How much time, money and resources are those challenges costing you?
  4. Can your existing processes, systems and software help you overcome current challenges?
  5. What would you like your PCMS to achieve – both in the short term and the longer term?

Installation is the first step

Merely installing software and technology solutions won’t mean that your firm will reap the rewards from its functionality. A PCMS is designed to centralise data, automate processes, and streamline tasks. Without the correct setup, training, implementation, and review processes in place, your firm will only achieve a digitalisation of inefficient processes.

Effectively measuring the impact of the software will also be a challenge – as it won’t be carrying out the tasks it was meant for. Without measurable benefits, the cost of the software is emphasised to the stakeholders involved.

This is particularly true if you’re looking to see a return from software you implemented a few years ago. If the way you use the software has remained the same as when you first implemented it, then the initial benefits will have waned. Without continuous review to identify areas of improvement, it becomes an impossible task to see continuous returns.

Software alone can’t help meet your goals, particularly without dedicating time to reviewing current processes, optimising processes based on the software’s capabilities and effectively training users to utilise the system.

Mindset of continuous improvement

An unlikely source of inspiration for achieving a return on your legal software investment can be found in the British cycling team. Until early 2000, the team had only ever won one gold medal in over 100 years. In 2008, Dave Brailsford took over the role of performance director, and – aided by his determination and continuous-improvement mindset – the team went on to dominate world cycling from 2008, breaking Olympic and world records.

Brailsford’s strategy was to focus on the 1% marginal-gains rule. He believed that “if you break down every little aspect of cycling and improve each by 1%, the final result would be significantly different.” And the results spoke for themselves.

The secret to his success was continuing to look for incremental gains, even if the results of performance were yet to be realised. It took a few years for the performance gains to be visible, but all the while, Brailsford continued to look for additional gains in every aspect of the team. Often, people tend to focus on big changes for large gains and ignore the small amendments that produce impactful results over time. As Brailsford said, “forget about perfection – focus on progression and compound the improvement.” It’s the cumulative effect of small changes and improvements that have big impacts on performance and progression.

How the cumulative effect equals return on investment

Take advantage of every feature and functionality your PCMS has to offer – to continually improve your firm’s case management, document production, time recording, accounting, and client journey processes by just 1% at a time, and the results will be phenomenal.

If you’re utilising 10% of a software’s capabilities, then you can only expect to achieve 10% of the returns. Implementing a mindset and process for continuous review and improvement is key to your firm achieving a return on investment. Without dedication, the investment simply becomes a cost.

Our latest eBook – How to achieve a return on your legal software investment – contains advice and guidance on implementing a continuous improvement mindset in your firm. Take a look to see how law firms can maximise the return on their legal software investment, by benefiting from the cumulative effect of 1% improvements across all departments, processes, and tasks.

LPM Conference 2025

The LPM annual conference is the market-leading event for management leaders in SME law firms

The age of agentic AI

Will AI agents transform how law firms use technology, driving efficiency and competitiveness in the year ahead?