If you’re in the camp that likes to read about wholesale transformation that avoids a ‘shiny things’ strategy, read on. Independent international law firm Kinstellar, driven by a couple of serious legal technology leader hires, has this year overhauled its technology stack, meeting a timetable that might make your eyes water. It is moving its practice management system to the cloud with Aderant Sierra, and is about to roll out Laurel AI for time and billing and Atlas for knowledge management, in keeping with a new best of breed strategy.
By way of recap or introduction if you’re not familiar, Kinstellar is an arguably slightly under-the-radar 400-lawyer, 15 office firm that operates across Emerging Europe, Turkey, Central and Southeast Asia. Spun off from Linklaters in 2008, its strategy is to provide magic circle quality work in lower cost regions that are economically challenging for magic circle firms to maintain a presence in. A big name in its own markets, our bet is that going forward, you’ll hear more about Kinstellar in international legal-tech conversations.
Advertisement
Kinstellar’s transformation drive began in earnest at the start of this year with the hire of Rob Morris and Ivan Rašić. Morris is a fractional transformation officer of note, having led remedial projects at Clifford Chance as regional COO at the turn of the century, and at Baker McKenzie as CEO United Arab Emirates. Rašić was previously director of engineering at stp.one but has a legal career stemming back to 2010, and his previous roles include CEO of legal PMS LegalTrek.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider about how the transformation drive at Kinstellar began, from an admittedly shaky beginning, Morris says: “We sat down together at the beginning of the year and we really ideated, we came up with a strategic plan across three years, across several pillars. One was focused on building the enterprise architecture that would set us up for success. And that’s the usual cloud-first, mobile-first sort of strategies, security, data, and all of the core foundations.
“The second part was more your traditional practise management side, looking at how do we really take what we’ve got to another level.
“There’s limited choices and none of the choices is a silver bullet to take us to the promised land. So we came up with a strategy which was, ‘let’s just focus on a good core finance system and then really look at point solutions across the matter lifecycle to improve both the business, the lawyer experience and also add the value on commercial excellence.’”
Kinstellar was on an old version of Aderant and Morris says: “From then we started embarking upon upgrades or new point solutions, such as Laurel for time recording and such as Aderant, which we were already on, but we’ve moved to Aderant Sierra.”
The Kinstellar team created a task force to fix any legacy issues and Morris observes: “All the things that we put band-aids on, we’ve gone through that like a bit of a bulldozer and tried to fix all of those things.”
Fixing vendor relationships has been key. Morris says: “We really didn’t have good relationships with many of the vendors, so at the beginning of all this, we went out to the vendors and said, ‘Are you serious about partnering with us? And it’s not about just giving us an upgrade. It’s really about being a strategic partner.’”
He adds: “We’re being more demanding but vendors are stepping up as well, and I think they’re probably stepping up because people like ourselves are saying, ‘We need more than just you as just a service provider giving us a piece of tech. We want you to be more of a partner on how do we use that tech and get the most out of it.’ So that’s been really quite key.”
Planning and development has been underpinned by a number of core principles that are at the heart of any successful transformation drive.
“Early is better than perfect when we talk about results, so early results are better than long implementation times. Then we talk about people and user experience, simplicity is at the core. So, improving upon systems that people already know and use rather than throwing them all together and replacing with something entirely new.”
Rašić says the team is always looking at interoperability and building up an open ecosystem because “you can always add pieces of a puzzle with best of breed products.” He says: “That’s not just today, but also down the line, so that we don’t get ourselves confined into some kind of a system and structure.”
From a governance perspective, there was a lack of clarity on ownership, both from the vendors but also internally. Morris says: “We’ve now, as part of the roadmap, said we’re not going to roll anything out until we have a clear technical owner and a clear business owner and explain what we mean by that. We gave them all some training and what’s expected of them in these roles. So they can drive the vendors, they can drive the business change as well. And that was pretty key because without business ownership, you can start to flounder a little bit.”
Harking back to the lack, so far, of shiny things and tools, Morris says: “If you don’t focus on [your infrastructure] and think ‘let’s just throw in new tools and do some experimentation,’ before long, you’ll find out that the backend can’t support it and you can’t get the true value, you can’t get access to the data or data hasn’t been organised correctly, or it doesn’t work very well in the infrastructure, in terms of integration and those kind of things. So even if you’re rolling out a Legora or a Harvey or whatever tool, you’ll find very quickly that when it comes to delivering the ROI, you’re going to struggle because the back end is playing catch up.”
What the team has focused on, particularly given the pressures in the market, is speed and cost, and that has informed its strategy. Morris says: “Most ERPs take 18 to 24 months to roll out. They’re costly, they take a long time, and often don’t go to plan as we discussed. But if you look at what we’ve done, a lot of these contracts have all been signed in the last couple of months. So within three or four months, we were already on our way and we’re expecting a significant change by the end of the year across all the infrastructure.
“Laurel’s going live in the first part of Autumn. Sierra’s going live in the second part of Autumn. We’re doing a bunch of things on our Microsoft environment. That’s all going live at the end of the year. We’re moving to SharePoint Online in the Cloud with an Atlas knowledge management solution on top. So that’s all happening towards the beginning of next year.
“There’s a lot of pieces, but what I’m really proud of is the speed at which we’re moving and the fact that the business are up for it. You know, normally it’s the lawyers who said, ‘no, there’s too much change, slow it down, there’s too much going on.’ And they’re actually now saying, ‘no, we want this change, bring it on.’ So that’s been quite encouraging as well.”
As usual, much comes down to leadership. Kinstellar lifer Kristóf Ferenczi, who took over as firm managing partner in January 2024, is credited with helping to spearhead change. Morris says: “There’s more business activity that’s going to take place that’s been sponsored by the managing partner. He’s so behind this and wants to see us achieve all of those business outcomes.”
See also:
Kinstellar selects Laurel AI in “commercial excellence” drive