Born in England, made in Scotland

We speak to Warren Wander, the creator of legal IT system LawWare, about how Scotland has been the bedrock to his company’s 25 years of success.

For hundreds of Scottish law firms, LawWare practice management software is an important part of daily operations, helping them to do everything from case management to time recording, risk management to accounts, as well as countless other vital business tasks. So, it’s ironic to hear that something so sophisticated and which plays such a serious role in professional life has its origins in computer gaming on the most ‘basic’ – pun intended – of home computers.

“When I was 12, I was bought a Sinclair ZX81. I can distinctly remember opening the box and the smell of it, it was a real ‘wow’ moment. To plug it into a TV and see it come to life, there was nothing like it around at the time,” LawWare founder and managing director Warren Wander says.

“I used to buy computer magazines from the newsagent and start typing in games and, really, I started learning how to programme. At the time, there were very few people doing that. Then, when I was 14, I had progressed to a ZX Spectrum and a friend of the family who was a solicitor saw what I was doing. He said that, with an accountant, they would like to set up a games business and would I like to be involved. I spoke to my parents and they thought it would probably be better for me to go and get a degree.”

Following his parents’ advice, Warren travelled across the Pennines from his home in Manchester and attended Sheffield Hallam University, completing a degree in computing studies. After a few years of travelling and working in various jobs, another meeting with the same family friend sparked a new idea.

“As a solicitor, he said he couldn’t find a good piece of practice software for his business, so he suggested I write something for him and I could keep the rights to it,” Warren says.

“At the time, around 1993, Microsoft had recently brought out Microsoft Access v1 and I thought: I could do a lot with that. In three months, I put together a solicitor’s road traffic case management system to manage his files. He thought it was great.”

Wider interest

At the same time as Warren was creating his early legal management programme, moves were being made by the Law Society of England and Wales to encourage the development of law-specific software.

“I made a contact at the Law Society of England and Wales and they became very interested in what I was doing,” Warren says.

“They wanted off-the-shelf, affordable software that anybody could pick up and use, and they had started an ambitious project called the HSSK – the ‘High Street Starter Kit’. They had formed a consortium of the Law Society of England and Wales with the Law Society of Ireland and the Law Society of Scotland, and they wanted to use their combined power to have this developed with a view to ‘accrediting’ software that met their stringent standards.

“They were looking for somebody to pioneer the project and asked me to look into building some macros in Word to simplify document assembly. I remember thinking this was exciting, suddenly working with the Law Societies. I started building a case management system, and six months later I went back and showed an early version of what I had created.”

Following further guidance from the Law Societies, who had developed a very detailed and comprehensive document of what they felt good legal software should do, two years later Warren had made a full legal practice management software prototype.

With excitement high, the Law Society of England and Wales started looking at ways to market the software. However, as a regulatory body, it soon became clear that it was unable to be involved in what was essentially a commercial venture. It left Warren with a fantastic piece of software, but not much of a plan.

“I wasn’t commercially minded in those days – I was a software developer having a bit of fun. However, the Law Society of Scotland came to me and said they had never wanted to commercialise the software, but if I were to move up to Scotland, they would help to make it known that great new software was available. I decided to give it a go and move up to Edinburgh and see what happened,” Warren says.

“I was looking for a challenge and I knew I really liked Edinburgh because my brother had studied there, so I felt I would give it three months and see how it went. This was in back in 1998.

“Edinburgh is such a beautiful city and a very easy place to get to know. So I rented a room in a flat on Castle Street and with encouragement from the Law Society of Scotland – who introduced me to a few more firms who started using bits of software – LawWare started to grow from there.”

Bug-free

Partly thanks to the IT chaos that it was feared would come with the ‘Millennium Bug’ – and the opportunity some IT businesses saw to cynically capitalise on it – LawWare’s client base developed quickly. The only issue was that Warren was still a one-man band having to deal with managing the software, product training and customer support. To solve this, the first member of LawWare staff was hired, and in relatively quick succession more came on board.

“Before I knew it, we had five, then 10, then 20 firms using the software, so I also took on a software developer,” Warren says.

“Those were really exciting times – I would say the best times of my life. It was very stressful and very challenging, but we had a very clear goal that we were trying to achieve, and we were stepping into the unknown.”

The world of IT doesn’t stay still and – recognising the increased interest in cloud computing – in 2010 Warren and LawWare developed an innovation and launched LawCloud.

“The word ‘cloud’ started to become marketed. I say ‘marketed’ because hosting has been around for a long time and this was essentially just hosting, but some clever person decided to call it ‘cloud’ and awareness and interest grew,” Warren says.

“We thought: we have LawWare software, which is installed on people’s servers in their offices, why don’t we be one of the first to introduce a cloud product and call it LawCloud? We put it on a hosted server, branded it as LawCloud, changed from a capital to subscription model, and that completely changed our business.”

Future-proofing

In the mid-2010s another development was also necessary. With advances in software technology and – especially relevant for law firms – enhanced online security provisions, Warren and his team felt it was time for a complete overhaul of LawWare’s software.

“We decided to start rewriting the software because we knew we needed something new and modern to get ahead of the game in today’s industry. However, by the third year of that process we realised what a mammoth task it is to rewrite a piece of software that is as enormous and feature-rich as LawWare,” Warren says.

“It has taken us many years and significant investment to finish the rewrite of the software from scratch in Microsoft’s latest language, but it’s well worthwhile because it is now using the most secure and advanced Microsoft platform that you can get. Security is paramount – it’s one of the biggest challenges in the legal space today. We’re encountering an ever-increasing number of law firms who have suffered significant financial loss because of very clever cyber criminals who are teasing money out of them and their clients, and it’s serious.

“So, we’ve built this new platform on security, as well as efficiency and modernisation; we can future-proof the software and adapt to change quickly. We have used Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure. Those are Microsoft’s bank-grade platforms, hosted in local data centres. With compliance and localisation being big things for the legal sector, using UK-based data centres is an important consideration.”

Continued growth

Warren and his team started rolling out New LawWare to clients 12 months ago.

“The majority of our clients want to be on this platform because it brings so many benefits. It is developed exclusively for the Microsoft Cloud, which is highly secure, robust, performant, yet scalable so that firms from the smallest sole practitioner up to medium- and larger-sized firms gain similar advantages. It uses SharePoint/OneDrive inside Microsoft 365, and includes a wealth of features such as incredible voice dictation, document auditing, collaboration and powerful search, and it has AI capabilities built in the background that can be utilised. The challenge for us is that we have so many clients and we want to make sure they can really make the most of the new features we have built,” Warren says.

Today, LawWare is probably the longest-standing independent practice management software house in the UK, with 25 staff and almost 500 law firms using its software – 85% of which are in Scotland and about 15% in England.

“Our English growth has come as a side benefit. With the internet, people find us and English firms started approaching us. But we are a Scottish business – the majority of our staff and clients are in Scotland and that is where we are based,” Warren says.

“Most of our clients are small to medium law firms with two to 10 partners. We tend to work with sole practitioners and firms up to 100 users, not the really big law firms.

“LawWare is not a corporate-led business. I’m a people person, we hand-pick our staff and we’re a business that really cares and prides itself on a first-class product and support service. I know many lawyers don’t like computers and IT can be a very scientific and numerical thing when people in the legal sector are trained to work with words. But I can translate computing speak to normal speak, and I think people like that. Essentially, I’m a techie who can talk to non-technical people, and I think that’s why LawWare has done well.

“We have exciting plans and a roadmap for the future that we’re really excited about. Technology is an amazing thing and LawWare is well positioned to help law firms really make the most of the frontiers that lay ahead.”

lawware.co.uk

Written by Matt Lamy, content as part of sponsored package.