Legal Technology Journal

LONDON, 16 December 2008 – A high-end international legal, tax and strategy consulting firm, Nishith Desai Associates, based in Mumbai, Bangalore and Palo Alto, has successfully gone live with 3E, the next-generation financial and practice management software system from Elite, a worldwide provider of integrated practice and financial management systems for professional services firms.  Elite is part of Thomson Reuters.

Nishith Desai, the founder of the firm, says, “We are excited that the firm is now live on Elite 3E. Technology has always been our value driver and has helped make our firm global.  Elite 3E will add significantly to the scale and quality of our growth.”

Milind Mundankar, chief technology officer at Nishith Desai Associates, says that as the firm continued to expand and focus on improving its client service, associates were faced with the need for a more flexible and integrated system that could produce customised and sophisticated management reports.

Milind says: “The firm had been successfully billing clients using a legacy system for the past ten years. We were looking for a system that would centralise the time billing and accounting functions and that offered inbuilt conflict check and pending collection modules.

“Fee-earners have been delighted with the way 3E allows them to check details and enter their time remotely. Partners are finding that reports can be generated rapidly and effortlessly, and that the software allows them to generate complex industry-wide and practice-area reports.

“Most impressive was the way in which the implementation was handled by Elite. The transition was smooth with minimal disruption to fee-earners and, since go-live earlier this month, a number of valuable training programs have already been successfully completed by Elite.”

Milind says that Nishith Desai Associates expects 3E to help the firm overcome a number of challenges in the future, such as improving interconnectivity between offices and generating vital profitability reports.

He adds “The financial management of the firm also will be enhanced due to the efficient collections module, the multi-reporting facility and the accounting system – which is centralised and also works at individual office level.

“3E offers rich functionality for our fee-earners. With 3E now live, we feel we can leverage our strong position in the market and are better equipped to meet our client service objectives and cope with expansion. The implementation of 3E has been fundamental in supporting our growth strategy.”

Nishith Desai Associates specialises in cross-border transactional work with a focus on the financial services, IT and telecom, pharma and life sciences, media and entertainment, and infrastructure sectors. Key practice areas include international finance and tax, corporate and securities, intellectual property as well as litigation and dispute resolution. The firm practices Indian law from its overseas offices in co-operation with local law firms in a wide variety of jurisdictions. The firm's founder, Nishith Desai, an international corporate and tax lawyer, has been ranked among the top 50 international tax lawyers in the world and was ranked amongst the eight best Indian tax advisors by the Legal 500 and Tax Directors Handbook 2009.

Kim Massana, senior vice president, Strategic Marketing & International at Elite, says the go-live is a significant strategic move for the firm. “The successful implementation of Elite 3E at Nishith Desai demonstrates the versatility of the solution to meet the evolving business needs of law firms worldwide. Every law firm has its own unique business processes, and 3E has been designed to allow firms to operate across many different jurisdictions and adapt to a variety of different commercial and accounting models.

“Elite 3E has quickly established itself as the practice management solution of choice for leading law firms. We are delighted to be playing a part in giving firms access to the kind of cutting edge business systems that today’s competitive law firm requires.”