CS Group now owns two IT companies that specialise in selling systems to law firms. Rupert White asks if this is the start of a long-heralded consolidation in the market - and what that means for lawyers

May and June have seen something very interesting happen - if, that is, you watch IT vendors who sell systems to law firms. In that time, two firms have been bought by a company that previously did not have a presence in the market.


Commentators have been saying for some time that the number of IT businesses supplying systems to law firms simply must reduce.


Long-time legal IT observer Professor Richard Susskind, for example, is of the opinion that, over the next ten years, the legal profession will experience a convulsion akin to that which gripped the worlds of industry and retail in the last ten. One expression of this great change will most likely be a drastic reduction in the number of companies providing services to the sector.


CS Group bought AIM in May and Laserform in June and went from nowhere to more than 2,500 law firm clients in two months. Vin Murria, CS Group's chief executive, told the Gazette that the company has no intention of stopping at two, so we should expect another one or two companies to be taken over before Christmas.


What this means for law firms is not so difficult to predict. CS Group has companies under its wing that make customer relationship management (CRM) systems and mobile data systems, for example.


CRM was the buzzword bingo game winner in IT for corporations five years ago, and there is every reason to suspect it will dominate IT for law firms in the near future. Expect to see these products and other additional 'value-add' systems being sold to law firms that are customers of AIM and Laserform and whichever other firms CS Group buys.


Is this a bad thing? Not at all, according to Bill Kirby, consultant and ex-head of legal IT company Axxia. 'The legal profession needs to move into CRM and CS Group will leverage that in there, and I think the leverage argument is a strong one,' he told the Gazette.


This reduction in the number of companies has to happen because developing new legal IT systems is just too pricey, he said. 'I genuinely think this is the beginning of a consolidation which probably needed to be done, because it costs a lot of money to invest properly in development.'


Law firms are also waking up to the value of new technology as competition gets stiff and margins get thin, Mr Kirby added.


But CS Group needs to recognise that the legal sector is not the same as retail, for example. 'What CS Group are really after is clients,' said Mr Kirby. 'But they've got to recognise that lawyers are different. They don't want to be forced to change. They don't want to believe they'll have to move from this platform to that platform because of consolidation in the market. How CS Group handles that aspect of it is important.'


Anyone who doubts that AIM and Laserform customers will at some point in the foreseeable future become much better acquainted need only note the following lines from CS Group's press release on buying Laserform: 'Laserfoem subsidiary LFM supplies practice management software, and synergies are planned with AIM... which operates in the same niche market... Laserform's products and services will enable us to maximise cross-selling opportunities across the legal sector and its practice management software will integrate well with our existing AIM Group business.'


What this means for customers is simple: CS Group is going to bring the technologies that businesses use to great effect to law firms. Whether practices will take to it will be down to how they are handled, and whether they realise that embracing high technology is the only route into the next age of the legal profession.