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Your custom law firm management software : available in as little as 30 days, with no subscription required
Your law firm deserves software that meets 100% of your business needs—not just 80%. IT SYSTEMES custom management software tailored to your firm, featuring automated time tracking, integrated billing, and native reporting. Available in as little as 30 days. Proprietary code, no subscription fees.
Most law firms manage their operations using multiple software programs that don’t communicate with each other. One tool for case files, another for billing, a third for time tracking—and Excel to fill in the gaps. Manual re-entry, inconsistent data, and reports that are impossible to generate. The SaaS solutions on the market—Jarvis Legal, Secib, Diapaz, Kleos—cover 80% of the industry’s common needs. The remaining 20%, the features that make a difference in your firm, are never covered.
IT SYSTEMES custom business software for law firms, delivered in as little as 30 days. You own the source code. No subscription fees. No dependence on a software vendor.
Why Standard Law Firm Management Software Isn't Enough
Law firm management software must address specific needs: tracking client cases, managing project phases (analysis, drafting, negotiation, litigation), coordinating between partners and associates, billing by the hour or on a flat-rate basis, and reporting by attorney, case, and legal practice area.
SaaS solutions address these needs in a generic way. That’s their model: a single product for thousands of firms. The problem is that the 20% of needs that aren’t covered are precisely those that shape the way you work: your invoice approval workflow among partners, your method for qualifying and opening a case, your process for tracking fee agreements, and the way you allocate time across different phases of the same case.
You've learned to work the way your software allows, not the way your job requires.
In practice, this means maintaining Excel exports alongside the software, re-entering data between tools, and data that never aligns. And a question that comes up at every partners’ meeting: isn’t there management software for our firm that would actually do what we need?
The Hidden Costs of SaaS Software for Law Firms
A SaaS provider builds its product with the majority of its customers in mind. As a result, you end up paying for features you don’t use. On average, 60 to 70% of the features in SaaS software are never activated. And the features you actually need are often missing or incomplete.
What the sales demo doesn't show:
- Per-user licenses: costs rise with every new hire. A firm that grows from 20 to 35 employees over three years sees its software costs increase by 75% without gaining any additional features
- Additional modules billed separately from the basic subscription: Advanced EDM, custom reporting, RPVA integration, and expense report module.
- Integrations with your existing tools (Sage or Cegid accounting software, Teams telephony, HR tools): complex, costly, and often incomplete
- Migration if you want to switch tools: €6,000 to €30,000 depending on the vendor, not including internal time.
- Time spent internally on workarounds in Excel—unbilled but very real—is estimated at several hours per week per employee in the firms we support.
Over a three-year period, the total cost of SaaS software for 20 users (licenses, integrations, modules, internal time) often exceeds €114,000. At the end of those three years, you own nothing. The code belongs to the vendor. If their prices rise by 30% or if they go out of business, you have no recourse.
How to Automate Time Tracking in a Law Firm
Time tracking is the lifeblood of any firm that bills by the hour. It is also the weak point of nearly all solutions on the market.
The classic scenario: a lawyer finishes work at 8 p.m. He opens his practice management software and tries to reconstruct his 10 hours of work based on his memory and his Outlook calendar. Short phone calls are forgotten. The 20-minute research sessions between meetings fall through the cracks. Quick proofreads aren’t recorded. The result: the firm loses billable time every day, for every associate, without even realizing it.
SaaS solutions offer either manual entry or a timer that can be activated. In both cases, the system relies on the lawyer’s personal discipline. In an environment where interruptions are constant—client calls, court hearings, internal meetings, urgent drafting—this discipline simply doesn’t hold up.
The solution developed by IT SYSTEMES a desktop plugin with real-time screen capture.
In practice, a discreet widget is installed in the Windows notification area (system tray) on each user’s computer. At regular intervals, the plugin asks the user: “What file are you currently working on?” The user selects the file and the type of activity (drafting, research, phone call, meeting, proofreading) with just two clicks. Time is tracked throughout the day with a level of detail that manual end-of-day data entry could never achieve.
This time is automatically broken down by case, project phase, and applicable hourly rate. When it comes time to bill, the managing partner simply needs to approve the time entries and generate the invoice—no re-entry, no reconstruction, and no delays.
This approach exists in other sectors (consulting, auditing), but SaaS providers rarely offer it to law firms because it requires custom development tailored to each specific work environment.
Case Study: From 30-Day Invoicing to a Full ERP System in 90 Days
A law firm with 50 employees contacted us with a problem that was simple to describe but complex to solve: their time tracking and billing systems did not accurately reflect the firm’s actual operations.
The situation before the project
The firm was using four separate software programs: one for project management, one for tracking stakeholders, one for billing, and Excel to fill in the gaps. Every day, data had to be manually re-entered from one tool to another. The figures didn’t match up. It was impossible to monitor operations in real time.
The specific sources of irritation were known to everyone:
- Unrecorded or approximate time entries . Lawyers would reconstruct their daily schedules at the end of the week, or sometimes at the end of the month. Billable hours were forgotten, underestimated, or assigned to the wrong case. In a firm that bills by the hour, every unrecorded hour represents lost revenue.
- Unrecorded client calls . A partner spends 25 minutes on the phone with a client discussing a complex case. The call isn’t recorded anywhere—neither in the case file nor in the billing records. When you multiply that by the number of employees, a significant amount of billable time vanishes every week.
- Expense reports not linked to case files. Travel, bailiff, translation, and research expenses incurred on behalf of a client were entered into a separate expense tracking tool, with no link to the relevant case file. Billing the client relied on a legal assistant’s memory or a separate Excel spreadsheet. Expenses slipped through the cracks every month.
- Reporting was impossible to produce. The managing partner had no reliable consolidated view: no profitability by case, no utilization rate per employee, and no projected revenue. Each executive committee meeting required half a day of manually compiling data extracted from four different tools.
A traditional vendor had submitted a quote for custom law firm management software with a similar scope: €388,000, with an estimated delivery time of 12 to 18 months.
Phase 1 — Billing software with automated time tracking, delivered within 30 days
Rather than launching an 18-month monolithic project, IT SYSTEMES starting with the most critical need: billing and time tracking.
Within 30 days, the firm received a fully functional, custom-built billing software system that included:
- The real-time time-tracking desktop plugin described above is installed on each employee’s computer. No more back-end data entry at the end of the day: time is captured in real time, file by file, phase by phase.
- A comprehensive structure organized by case and project phase. Each case is broken down into phases (analysis, drafting, negotiation, litigation, etc.) with assigned personnel and applicable hourly rates. Time logged via the plugin is automatically allocated to the appropriate phases.
- A module for generating invoices directly. The invoice is generated based on the hours approved by the responsible partner. No more re-entering data, no more delays between tracking and billing.
- Native reporting. Available from the moment the system goes live: billable hours vs. hours worked per employee, revenue per case, completion rate by phase, and profitability by legal practice area.
Immediate result: The firm saw an increase in the amount of time actually tracked and billed starting in the very first month of use. Hours that had previously gone unrecorded—such as brief phone calls, research between meetings, and proofreading—were now captured by the plugin.
Phase 2 — Integrating Teams Calling with Expense Reports
The trust built during Phase 1 led the firm to request two extensions to address the other two leaks that had been identified.
Integration with Microsoft Teams: AI-powered automated call summaries
Every call made or received via Microsoft Teams is now automatically transcribed and summarized using artificial intelligence. The system generates a structured summary that includes participants, topics discussed, decisions made, and next steps. This summary can be attached to the relevant file with a single click. If the call is billable, the time is automatically entered into the billing module with the correct file, phase, and hourly rate.
In practice: An employee hangs up after a 20-minute call with a client. Before, nothing happened—the call was either forgotten or jotted down on a sticky note. Now, a structured summary appears, linked to the case file, with the time automatically recorded. The lawyer can approve or adjust it with a single click.
Integration with the expense reporting tool: automatic reimbursement of out-of-pocket expenses
Expense reports (travel, legal fees, miscellaneous disbursements) are now linked directly to the client file through the firm’s existing NDF tool. Each billable expense report automatically appears in the file’s billing module, ready to be included in the next client invoice. No more separate Excel files, no more forgotten disbursements.
Phase 3 — Transition to a comprehensive ERP system for law firms
Building on its billing infrastructure and functional integrations, the firm decided to expand its scope to include a custom ERP system covering the entire management cycle:
- Integrated CRM. Prospect tracking, communication history, and new case pipeline. Partners have a consolidated view of the firm’s business development, including fee agreements currently under negotiation.
- Planning and Assignment. Assigning staff to cases, tracking team workload, and anticipating scheduling conflicts. The managing partner can see who is working on what and at what capacity, in real time.
- Centralized document repository. Contract templates, legal opinions, internal memos, and key case law—indexed by case, client, and legal subject. Every document produced is linked to its context and accessible to all authorized users.
- Integrated expense report module. Expense reports no longer go through an external tool: they are natively integrated into the case-billing-rebilling cycle.
Delivery of the complete ERP system: 90 days in total. Total cost: €105,000. The firm owns the full source code, with no subscription fees or royalties.
Direct savings: €283,000 compared to a competitor’s quote for the same scope of work.
Why a phased approach works better than a monolithic project
This case illustrates a point that traditional service providers overlook: a law firm doesn't have to wait 18 months to improve its billing.
The phased approach offers three key advantages:
Immediate ROI. From the very first month, the billing software delivers measurable value. The firm doesn’t have to wait for a full-scale ERP system to be implemented to start recouping lost billable time.
Seamless user adoption. Lawyers don’t like having all their tools changed at once—and they’re right. A discreet plugin that asks them which case they’re working on causes minimal disruption. New features are added only after users have gotten used to the previous ones. Adoption happens through demonstration, not coercion.
A scope that evolves with use. A firm’s actual needs cannot be fully captured in an initial 80-page requirements document. Phase 1 reveals uses that the firm had not anticipated. The Teams integration, for example, was not part of the initial scope: it was the daily use of the billing software that highlighted the amount of time wasted on untracked calls. Subsequent phases take this into account.
How IT SYSTEMES law firm management software in as little as 30 days
30 days for an invoicing module or a CRM system. 90 days for a full-scale ERP system. In both cases, that’s 4 to 18 times faster than traditional development.
Hyperdevelopment: a method developed over two years of R&D
IT SYSTEMES standardized what is known as "hyperdevelopment." The method is based on three elements that, when combined, reduce development time by a factor of 12 to 18:
Proven architectural foundations, tested across dozens of projects: authentication, rights and role management, APIs, user interface, and document management. These components aren’t recreated for every project—they’re adapted and configured.
Code generation using artificial intelligence, supervised by a senior developer. AI accelerates code production. The senior developer ensures quality, architectural consistency, and maintainability. What used to take 4 to 9 months using traditional development methods now takes 15 to 20 days.
A continuous validation process with the client. No six-month-long period with no visibility. The client sees the software evolve every week, tests the screens, and validates the workflows. Adjustments are made during development, not after delivery.
What you'll receive upon delivery
Depending on the project, IT SYSTEMES full ownership of the software 30 days or 90 days after the project’s completion:
- Full source code: readable, modular, and free of dependencies on proprietary frameworks. Any qualified developer can pick it up and work with it.
- Comprehensive technical documentation: every module is documented, and every architectural choice is justified.
- Intellectual property rights: modify, host, or share the code with whomever you like. No retention clauses.
- Hosting in France: native GDPR compliance, hosted in French data centers. On-premises deployment is available on your own servers for firms subject to enhanced security requirements.
- No additional cost per user: whether you hire 10 or 200 people, the cost remains the same.
- Support for 30 days after delivery: response within 4 hours, critical bugs fixed within 24 hours.
ROI Guarantee: If the project does not generate savings exceeding its cost within 18 months, IT SYSTEMES 15 additional days of development at no charge. Average ROI observed for completed projects: 8 months.
What is the budget for custom law firm management software?
IT SYSTEMES its pricing. There are three tiers based on the complexity of the project:
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