LEAP, Actionstep or Smokeball: what matters from an IT point of view?

Choose the platform on how your firm practises, since that is a legal decision rather than a technical one. What matters from the IT side is narrower and more neglected: how well it integrates with your email and documents, what it needs from your environment, and how you would get your data out.

The three platforms common in Australian small firms, LEAP, Actionstep and Smokeball, all cover the core: matters, documents, time recording, billing and trust accounting. They differ in emphasis, in how they handle automation and precedents, and in the areas of practice they suit best. Those differences are real and they are for the firm to weigh, ideally by trialling with actual matters rather than watching demonstrations.

Where IT genuinely has something to say is integration, and it is where firms most often lose the value they paid for. The question is whether an email arriving about a matter can be filed to that matter without someone re-saving it, whether a document created in Word lands in the right place automatically, and whether time gets captured where the work happens. When that integration is weak or unconfigured, staff maintain a parallel filing habit in Outlook and the practice system slowly becomes a billing tool rather than the record of the matter.

The second IT question is what the platform needs from your environment. Cloud-hosted options need reliable internet and sensible identity management, which most firms already have or should. Anything still running on-premise or through a hosted desktop needs infrastructure decisions attached, and those carry ongoing cost and refresh obligations that belong in the comparison. Ask specifically what happens when staff work from home, from court, or from a client's office, because that is where the differences show.

Third, ask about your data before you need it. Who owns it, in what format can you export it, and what happens at the end of the relationship. This is not a hostile question and a confident vendor answers it plainly. It matters most because practice management holds records you must retain for years, sometimes longer than you will hold the software, so the ability to extract material in a usable form is a retention question rather than a commercial one.

If you are migrating, treat it as a project with a scope rather than a switchover. Historical matters, documents, time and trust records all move and all need verifying afterwards, not just counting. Plan it for a quieter period, keep the old system readable for a defined time, and expect a productivity dip while people relearn the tool they use most. Firms that skip the parallel period are the ones that discover a gap three months later with no way back.

Two practical points that sit under all three platforms. Security follows the same rules regardless of vendor: multi-factor authentication on access, restricted permissions, and confirmation of what the vendor does about backup, since a hosted platform is still your data and your obligation. And whoever supports your IT should understand the practice system well enough to be useful, because a provider who treats it as somebody else's application leaves the firm mediating between two suppliers during a busy week.

Ask about the vendor's own security posture as part of the evaluation, since your obligations follow your client data wherever it sits. Where is it hosted and in which country, what multi-factor authentication options exist for your staff, what happens if their platform is compromised, and what are their notification commitments to you. A mature vendor answers these readily, and the quality of the answer is itself information about how they operate.

The honest caveat is that the best system is the one your people actually use as intended, and the second-best system used properly beats the best one worked around. If your current platform is disliked, find out whether the problem is the software or the way it was configured and integrated, because reimplementation is often cheaper and less disruptive than replacement. If you want the integration and infrastructure side assessed, call 1800 456 567.

Whichever platform you settle on, agree who inside the firm owns it, since a system with no internal owner drifts out of configuration within a year and everybody blames the software.