Gould & Ratner Agrees to Be A Beta Client for Wilson Ideate Software

USA/Canada News

27
Apr
2018

Editor

Wilson Legal Solutions, a leading provider of software and services for law firms and professional services organizations, today announced that Gould & Ratner LLP has agreed to be a beta client to integrate Wilson Ideate software with Rippe & Kingston Legal Management System.

This will be the first integration of Rippe with Wilson Ideate, a business intelligence (BI) solution that enables firms to access, analyze, and share data to drive smarter decisions.

Ken Koehn, CFO at Gould & Ratner, had been researching options to gain more insight and analytics into the firm’s accounting data. After attending sessions at the Association of Legal Administrators and Wilson Knowledge Summit, Koehn became aware of Wilson Ideate and saw its value for Gould & Ratner. He explains, “Several years ago, Gould & Ratner committed to adopting more rigorous operational and administrative discipline to help us run more efficiently. As such, we need more direct access and the ability to analyze data residing in our Rippe software. With Wilson Ideate, we can gain this insight and avoid the costs and delays involved with developing custom reports.”

Gould & Ratner had worked with Wilson Legal Solutions on an extensive compensation and profitability study in 2017. During this time, it became apparent that Gould & Ratner would be a good fit as a beta client. Russ Haskin, Wilson’s director of business of law consulting, explains, “For a firm to roll out and gain partner buy-in on profitability analyses in a short amount of time is one thing. To do so while also revamping and gaining buy-in on the entire partner compensation model is a tremendous achievement. That sort of dedication made it clear that the firm was a great place to intertwine new analytics and ideas without total interruption of their culture.” 

Bo Yancey, Wilson’s director of client relationships, adds, “Wilson Ideate was built to work with data residing in Elite Enterprise and Elite 3E practice management software. As we worked with Gould & Ratner on the profitability study, we both saw the value in collaborating to build standard points of integration between Wilson Ideate and Rippe.”

Koehn says the firm decided to pursue Wilson Ideate for several reasons, beginning with the people involved. “I’ve known many of the people at Wilson for more than 15 years and trust them. I know the quality they provide and the integrity of the people. The other products were from companies I'd never heard of, much less had past relationships with,” he explains. “Seeing demonstrations of Wilson Ideate, particularly its pricing and planning capabilities, convinced me. It offers a way to help attorneys or people in finance, business development, and marketing work through the pricing of fixed-fee matters and alternative-fee arrangements. It pulls in information from your profitability and billing rates and allows you to confidently set a fixed-fee price and know that you'll still be profitable if the plan is executed.”

Gould & Ratner has worked with Wilson on other legal technology projects in addition to the profitability study, including an Intapp Time implementation. The firm is currently planning the next steps in the beta site project plan with Wilson, which will follow the agile development methodology to streamline the project and speed time to deployment.