Elite’s cloud customers will outnumber its on-premises customers by the end of 2026, with SaaS users growing 60% YoY to 53,000, and over 120 law firms now live in the cloud. Elite’s cloud platform has now processed $145bn in billing transactions.
Elite rightly points out that these metrics are a marker of how quickly the industry’s centre of gravity has shifted towards cloud-native financial operations. Where other technologies such as document management have long seen high levels of cloud adoption, practice management has trailed significantly, driven by complexity, cost, and fear around loss of billing time.
New pressures around the need to answer questions in real time and leverage AI – combined with the fact that the technology is no longer nascent – are changing the dialogue, and in turn timetables and selection choices.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Elite’s CEO Mark Dorman said: “In order for me to take advantage of new technology, I can only do that if I’m on a modernized infrastructure and particularly a SaaS native platform. And so that’s the acceleration that we’ve seen.”
He adds: “By the end of this year, we’ll have more customers in the cloud than we have on prem, which is a pretty remarkable shift.”
Fifteen additional Am Law 200 firms signed up to go to Elite’s cloud product this year.
In terms of cloud performance, Dorman said that firms using the SaaS 3E platform have seen days sales outstanding (DSO) decline by 11%. Dorman said that “that’s real money in terms of collecting their cash faster. And they report month-end close processes, which is a pretty manual, painful process to get their month end close, those are up to 85% faster because they’re using modern technology.”
As to how law firms have overcome some of the fears that have held them back from adopting cloud PMS technology, Dorman said that the industry has had both a data and an infrastructure problem, not an AI problem. “If they want to take advantage of this new technology, they’re discovering that they’ve got this infrastructure that doesn’t fit their need with the legacy that they’ve had. And so they’ve got to move to a new legacy. And the benefit of that compared with the risk of not doing it is much higher than the effort in moving it forward.”
Among the 123 firms currently live on 3E Cloud, 88% are actively using 3E Time, more than 70% are using Data Insights, and more than 40% are using both 3E Proforma and eBillingHub.