Law firm mergers may be a frequent occurrence these days, but they continue to be major undertakings for the firms' IT departments. And while most law firm IT directors have at least one merger under their belt, it is rare for a merger to run its course without putting a serious number of grey hairs on the heads of the project managers.

But the recent merger between Addleshaw Booth & Co and Theodore Goddard (TG) to create a new practice, Addleshaw Goddard, appears to be an exception to the general rule. Despite an unusually aggressive strategy and an ambitious timetable – or perhaps because of this – the merger exercise seems to have raised the bar in terms of efficient planning and delivery.

"Simply linking existing systems was not an option," says Damian Griffiths, IT director at Addleshaw Goddard. "The IT staff [at Theodore Goddard] were initially wary of the timescales proposed by 'these madmen from the north', but once the project got underway they realised that it was possible, that we could do it."

Both firms have been referred to in the legal press as 'serial bridesmaids' – a rather unkind way of saying that both were very serious indeed about securing a successful merger. In any event, discussions began in earnest at the start of the year.

By February, the firms had agreed timescales for the due diligence phase and the two sides took the somewhat unusual step of declaring to each other the comprehensive list of IT equipment and software licences, which enabled them to begin considering the issues associated with gluing the two practices together.

As managing partner of the dominant firm Mark Jones was a veteran of several previous mergers and, wary of running into the same problems this time around, he resolved that this time things would be done differently.

"When we created Addleshaw Booth our initial aim was to create a firm that was dominant in Leeds and Manchester," he says. "And we always said we needed a second merger, around 2002, to take care of London and move on to become a leading UK firm by 2007. We merged again in May 2003 – I suppose we could be accused of being boringly predictable."

Addleshaw Booth started an active selection process for a merger partner in 2002. "From a long, long list of possible candidates, we ended up with a shortlist," Jones says. "TG was one of five. We now know that TG had also started a parallel selection process at around the same time; they drew up their own shortlist in August 2002 and on that list Addleshaw was one of the seven."

Other firms on the TG shortlist included US firms Pillsbury Winthrop, Morrison & Foerster, Winston & Strawn and UK rivals CMS Cameron McKenna and DLA .

Jones argues that this was the first time anybody had tried to take a "proper" City firm and merge it with a blue-chip regional firm.

"This merger was entirely consistent with what we wanted to do in 1997," he says. "On the TG side they had issues of critical mass, management and client development. Twenty years ago the firm had its name in lights, along with the likes of Clifford Turner and what has now become CMS Cameron McKenna. But in the intervening years these firms grew through a series of carefully planned mergers. While TG retained its reputation, it did not gain the critical mass."

Jones says both firms wanted a merger, but for entirely different reasons. Once the management team began to look under the surface – and saw, for example, a remarkably similar approach to client relationships – it all started to fit together. According to Jones, the merger has produced some quick client wins, with appointments to the legal panels of Barclays and BT.

"From our due diligence, some of the feedback suggested that there was substantial advantage hinged around our potential to exploit the [Lovells'] Mexican-Wave concept," he says. "Lovells collaborates with two small regional firms, but it does not have complete control of them. The issues for clients are risk management, quality control and brand management – we believe no other firm can offer the same degree of brand control and depth of resource [as we can]."

When Griffiths was given the go-ahead for the merger project to begin in earnest, the IT department only had five weeks to put everything together, including:

1moving TG from Novell to Windows 2000;
1migrating TG from Groupwise to Exchange; and
1migrating TG's document management system from a Hummingbird platform into Addleshaw Booth's iManage system.

Griffiths says that from 1 May all staff could access both firms' intranets, but these were kept as separate entities for the first few weeks. "We had zero external help: we came to the conclusion that we were on such a critical path that we had to do it all ourselves," he says.

"We had to find our own software to do the
e-mail migration, software to do the Hummingbird-to-iManage migration and we had to project manage how it all worked. Plenty of suppliers and consultants were waiting in the wings, wanting in, but we did not need them."

The date of the merger announcement was 16 April and the firms were not prepared to commit to any major IT investment until then – so it was quite a difficult exercise for the IT departments, Griffiths says. One tactic that worked was to sign up to non-disclosure agreements with suppliers and take software on trial pending the merger announcement.

At TG's London offices the team had to upgrade the entire local area network and server infrastructure before the migration from a Novell/NDS environment to a Microsoft network. Training the entire TG user base took place during the two weeks of TG's April year-end.

"Our Word macros were also written so that we could just add the new office fields," Griffiths says. "But in the event of the merger the marketing department wanted to forge a new brand so we had to change all the fonts, margins and so on; so the Word upgrade could have been easy, but it turned into a complete rewrite."

Adding to the workload, the former Addleshaw Booth offices went live with a new Elite practice management system just two days after the London office relaunch. The former TG still uses Norwel accounts software; this will migrate to Elite by the end of the year.

In practical terms Addleshaw Booth had only just finished aligning its business strategy and IT strategy when the merger with TG was suddenly on the cards. The general approach since then has been to create a 'national IT department' whose future shape depends on how the firm's business strategy develops.

One casualty of the merger was that Addleshaw Booth felt obliged to break away from its profitable volume conveyancing business, Enact. "When we set up Enact we wanted it branded separately because we wanted the option to be able to float it or dispose of it in the future," Jones says. "And with the current state of the stock market, floating Enact was out of the question."

He argues that Addleshaw Booth's business, which is focused on the Leeds-London-Manchester triangle, has no overlap with Enact. "The next possible stage for Enact was to position it on the high street," he says. "Most likely as a joint venture with a financial institution. But with our merger and our 10-year plan we had limited resources for such a move so it was more sensible to dispose of it."

Jones reacts with surprise to the notion that the merger brought with it a raft of expensive technology bills. "With the merger, there was remarkably little of what I would call cost," he says. "For example, with Addleshaw Booth's migration to Elite we have enough licences for all of TG; so it is effectively a zero practice management software cost. The new word processing platform did cost money – about £1.1m – but fundamentally you only merge law firms on the back of a very tangible business case. We had a serious concern at the start of the merger process that the IT costs would be a far greater number."

In contrast with standard practise, which Addleshaw Booth followed during its last merger, this time around the firm refused to contemplate any convergence period.

"I have been there, I got the t-shirt and I do not want it again," Jones says. "There is no benefit in waiting. In 1997, for the Addleshaw Booth merger we had a convergence period of three years. At the end of year one it had become such an impediment that we tore up the plans and threw them away."

Jones says part of why this merger has looked to be so smooth is that the management team had learned a lot from the 1997 merger. "The biggest lesson is: do not have a convergence period: it gives rise to a lot of tree-hugging, silo-digging and other destructive behaviour," Jones says.

William James, formerly the head of TG's corporate practice and now in a similar role at Addleshaw Goddard, says the financial impact of the merger was not as significant as one might expect. "With this merger there were no concerns about having to outsource anything [to reduce costs]," he says. "Both firms were self-sustaining, profit generating business units. And it did go very smoothly: if you asked any of the fee earners whether they had noticed any major changes the answer would be no."

James argues that one reason for the lack of fee earner issues following consummation of the marriage was that TG's user base is unusually advanced for a law firm in its use of IT. "We have always had a philosophy of getting the maximum benefit from the systems available to us and about 60% of fee earners are what you would call 'expert users'," he says. "This was borne out of our extremely high ratios of fee earners to secretaries… until the merger we did not quite understand just how competent the user base was."

TG's senior management agreed with Griffiths' aggressive approach to conducting the technology side of the merger, according to James. "And it worked," he says.

"We were unsure that all the fee earners would run with the new system from the first moment, but we should not have worried. A lesson for the future is to have confidence that – as a result of Microsoft's hegemony, I suppose – the operational characteristics of all systems are very similar. For end users the move to Outlook was just a hop, a skip and a jump; there were no issues at all."

In most cases when two large firms merge, one of the two IT directors is rapidly pushed out of a job along with many of the IT staff. But in this case TG's team, led by IT director Gordon Hill, worked in tandem with the northern interlopers to secure the merger's success and continue to support the combined firm. At the time of writing there have been no mass layoffs.

Griffiths, meanwhile, is not sitting on his laurels. Now that the merger is largely out of the way – and the firm's new business model is taking shape – there is a pressing need to redefine the practice's IT strategy.

Griffiths is coy on this point, but offers a few hints. "We try to come up with IT innovations that genuinely solve clients' problems," he says. "Most law firms have made progress with their extranets, but there is still a long way to go. There are plenty of untapped resources in law firms that would benefit clients – take our strengths with document management, an area that clients are starting to be interested in. We often find in-house teams are 'off the radar' of their corporate IT department; we can help them still find solutions."

He argues that it costs clients a lot of money to manage large portfolios of contracts and deeds. There are some huge administrative issues, he says, and many clients find it frustrating. "A client's contract management system could or should, in effect, be our system. For some of our clients, that is what we are starting to put in place. It is complicated in the legal panel environment – no client wants to be permanently tied to a single law firm – but it is better than the extranet jungle that some in-house teams are having to cope with."

On the other hand, Griffiths insists that security is now less of a problem in its practical application than it used to be. "Before, many clients had SSL blocking on their firewalls; they did not understand security," he says. "Now they do. Some clients are increasingly proactive on security requirements. It is a welcome move, but it is hard work. The Co-operative Bank went through our systems and procedures with a fine toothcomb; we were more than proud that they declared everything to be satisfactory."