By Mark Dorman, CEO, Elite

With 2024 quickly coming to a close, we are turning our focus to 2025 and preparing for another year of fast-paced change for law firms around the world. Over the past year we have been hearing first-hand about the challenges and pain points firms are facing, as well as their ambitions for the future. Whether it is ensuring fee-earners are more focused on high-value work rather than administrative tasks or getting access to the data and insights they need to drive growth and profitability, our customers are trying to keep up with the ever-increasing speed of technological change.

And we do not expect the pace to slow down. Like this year, we anticipate changing marketplace dynamics and different forces will continue to put pressure on law firms in 2025. For example, firms are spending more money on increasing overhead expenses, yet they are collecting less on the average worked rate. Firms must figure out how to close this gap—and they need to be more efficient when it comes to delivering and managing their work, while spending less time on administrative tasks. At the same time, lawyers and business and financial operations teams, increasingly, want more technology and better tools to automate mundane and repetitive tasks and free up time and resources for higher value work.

Against this backdrop, law firms have been looking at how they can rapidly evolve the way they work, and our customers tell us that they have a few key priorities:

• Improving efficiency by streamlining and automating processes—with a growing interest in deploying SaaS solutions and AI tools and capabilities to do this
• Optimizing resource allocation and managing costs more effectively
• Enhancing decision-making by getting access to richer data analytics and insights

We are listening to our customers and partnering with them to help them address these priorities through our SaaS solutions by focusing on three key areas.

1. Elevating Customers to the Cloud

In 2024, we began to see a real tide shift as more and more firms began prioritizing moving to the cloud as part of their broader digital transformation plans. These firms recognize that using cloud-based technology keeps them at the forefront of software developments, making IT management easier and more cost-effective while unlocking new innovative possibilities—and as we close this year, more than 20% of our customers have moved to our cloud solutions.

Critically, instead of having multiple products working separately, our SaaS solutions enable firms to connect their workflows so they can improve productivity, get paid faster, and reduce risk. This is further enhanced by our ability to integrate our capabilities seamlessly with third-party solutions via a large and growing library of APIs. The future, clearly, is a truly integrated one.

2. Architecting the AI Frontier

SaaS solutions also enable law firms to take advantage of the potential that AI brings to simplify processes, automate labor-intensive and error-prone tasks, and deliver critical capabilities at scale. We are integrating AI into our suite of solutions in several ways that are powerful and seamless to the users.

These include embedding natural language search across business workflows and data sources to enable quick and easy access to information and leveraging bots to replace time-consuming and routine business processes. And we are constantly developing new AI enhancements, optimizing our solutions to solve firms’ pain points and deliver real business value. In 2025, you can expect substantial, high-impact innovation from us in this area.

3. Delivering Data-driven Insights

As the next generation of law firm leaders rise through the ranks, they increasingly want meaningful, actionable data to help make informed decisions about day-to-day operations and future strategy. Cloud solutions can streamline the flow of firm data and augment it with relevant third-party data where necessary for context, while AI can provide powerful data analytics capabilities.

It is also important that our solutions provide customers with intelligent insights presented in easy-to-understand reports, dashboards, and visualizations. By covering all a firm’s financial and practice management processes from time entry to billing and collections, our SaaS solutions can provide important insights and become a single source of truth for firms’ financial and business operations—and that is an asset that has never been more important for decision makers.

As law firms look toward 2025, they will rely on their technology providers to be one beat ahead: to anticipate—and provide solutions to—the opportunities and challenges they face and provide the technology which sits at the heart of their success. At Elite, that is exactly what we have been doing for more than seven decades…and what we will continue to do.