Future Bound IT provide AbacusNext Partner support for Check My Legal Fees

https://www.checkmylegalfees.com

Check My Legal Fees are a team of legal costs experts with over 60 years experience in their field.

Like ourselves they are an independent organization and a new business who expect to grow exponentially over the course of 2018.

The Check My Legal Fees team currently work from Amicus Online, a streamlined version of Amicus Premium 2016 that is also supported by ourselves.

Due to anticipated business growth, and increasing success in their field (which means more cases and more work ) Check My Legal Fees decided in late 2017 to make a decision to transition from Amicus Online to Amicus Premium 2016 and the APC or Abacus Private Cloud environment. Due to the feature-rich capabilities, Amicus Premium provides and the additional capacity to store more matters than its online counterpart it seemed to be a logical choice for the firm.

We were approached in October 2017 by Check My Legal Fees who were looking for a UK based AbacusNext partner to support their software inside UK operating hours. As Amicus Online is a hosted service we knew that there would be situations where the escalation of issues was required and that we would need to provide support in standard business hours that would extend into the evening. It was on this basis we suggested a 2-month “ramp up” or trial period support contract to allow Check My Legal Fees to assess our support services.

Our engagement began in November of 2017 and ran until the beginning of January 2018. In standard working hours, we worked as technical account managers and 1 st line software support for the firm with escalation also in place that we took full accountability for to ensure that service levels were met and issues worked through until resolution.

We also provided availability until late evening to allow for time zone differences between ourselves and our partner AbacusNext.

After working through connectivity issues for Amicus Online and improving service levels for the business we were pleased to discover that Check My Legal Fees had decided to sign up with us for a longer-term, describing our support services as ‘excellent.’

Check My Legal Fees are due to make a transition to Amicus Premium 2016 and APC shortly with migration underway and we will be supporting the new services as soon as it is live. We’re excited about the potential to grow with the business and anticipate a successful 2018.

Orbit Informatics is a leading software and BPO or business solution house based in London and Bangladesh. Cost efficiency and structured teamwork have allowed them to excel at the solutions they deliver. From concept and design to development, testing and finally implementation their highly skilled team works with their clients every step of the way.

Orbit initially approached us to discuss a UK based sales and marketing project designed to help them develop their UK presence and win new business and clients. The company is like ourselves a young one and as such we understood the difficulties and tribulations of developing a brand and presence from almost the ground up.

Working closely with Orbit we’ve made sure that our costs were in line with their budget. We are firm believers in helping companies succeed and want to see Orbit grow from strength to strength. Adopting an agile approach to this project has allowed us to provide valuable feedback to the team, and to strengthen and develop Orbit’s outbound marketing campaign in the UK.

We’ve been impressed since day one with the professionalism of Orbit and the quality of the work they produce. From the inception, both our businesses have ensured that collaboration and communication are paramount and having received excellent feedback within our first week of this project had proven that we are able to defy distance and work effectively as an extension of Orbit’s sales team.

Although the project is currently in early stages and has not been without its challenges it is ongoing, and we feel that it’s going to grow from strength to strength. We’re limited due to NDA about what can be disclosed as to our strategy but with a background of over 11 years in the industry, we’ll continue to go above and beyond to ensure Orbit meet with continued success.

If you’d like to discuss freelance technology project support you can contact us via our website or on contracting services Upwork, People per hour or contract recruit.

Future Bound IT provides UK based AbacusNext Partner support for Deep Blue Costs

https://www.deepbluecosts.com/

Deep Blue Costs is a cost law firm who have been established since 2015 and are driven by an experienced team of consultants and led by director Mark Carlisle who has over 40 years of costs law experience. Like ourselves, they aim to provide excellent service and results to their clients.

As a consultancy, we support and provide Amicus Attorney practice management solutions and AbacusNext Private Cloud which operates not only as a secure environment for practice management software but as an IaaS service for the legal and financial sectors. We are currently the only UK based consultancy who work closely with AbacusNext delivering and supporting their solutions on a regional and national basis.

We were approached by Deep Blue Costs in October of 2017 as the firm has been users of Amicus Attorney Practice Management software for many years. Like many other firms in their sector, the company had decided to move to a private cloud environment provided by  AbacusNext.

Deep Blue Costs were looking for additional support for their software and environment within UK business hours having found that it had been difficult to contact engineering teams in the US when needed and were also keen to establish a point of contact and escalation that would be available to assist with day to day and evening issues.  AbacusNext provide 24/7 support services for their customers but with over 200,000 firms to assist also felt a UK Based consultancy could provide the additional support required.

After discussion of some of the issues faced by Deep Blue Costs with director Mark Carlisle and  AbacusNext we decided it was important to provide not only technical support and escalation for the firm but that service levels would need to be drastically improved and relationships developed to ensure fast resolution of issues and to maintain solid and robust engagement between all organisations and teams involved.

The biggest challenge faced by all parties was distance. With AbacusNext being headquartered in San Diego and the Amicus Attorney support team being based in Toronto we felt it essential to provide a support service that would act as one point of contact for our mutual customer while remaining flexible enough to adapt to drastically different business hours and provide the support required.

We initially ran a trial support contract to allow Deep Blue Costs to assess our services and capabilities, providing technical account management, software support and ticket assessment and escalation in standard business hours with extended availability until late evening to allow for collaboration with Abacus Next engineering teams and resolution of issues when required.

At the beginning of 2018, Deep Blue Costs trial period came to an end and after a brief discussion with our customer, we were pleased to hear they were delighted with our support services but wanted to move to a case by case support model. We currently provide an hourly rate service to Deep Blue Costs that scales up and down with the business and offers the same support hours as before.

Working with Deep Blue Costs and closely with our partner AbacusNext has allowed us to develop and nurture working relationships and gain a better understanding of some of the trials, tribulations and pains of IT in the legal sector whilst taking pride in delivering a level of service we would expect to receive ourselves.

Future Bound IT Ltd is an agile IT business that supports IT networks and designs solutions from the ground up that solve business challenges. In April 2020 during the height of the first lockdown, we began a project and launched a GoFundMe crowd funder to create an application that would support communities and the UK Mutual Aid network, as well as the vital work of police monitoring groups.

Along our initial journey, we discovered that Barnet (a borough of London) UK Mutual aid had also embarked on a similar project. We had initially contacted Barnet to introduce our project to their network and very quickly discovered there was a synergy between our organisations and a common goal to work towards.

Working as part of a dedicated team IT consisting of Barnet UK Mutual Aid and our development partner My Remote Partner we have embraced a ‘learn by doing it’ style that has produced positive results.

We are a highly skilled and professional project team consisting of developers, designers, product and project managers who believe in helping others. Barnet recognised at an early stage the imminent threat of isolation to our most vulnerable neighbours and community, and with the increase of abuse of COVID-19 emergency powers, we also acknowledged the threat of police harassment for volunteers carrying out their day to day tasks.

With the overall goal of the Mutual Aid Network being to respond to help requests as quickly and safely as possible we decided to work together to build a free volunteer app. The goal of our application is to make volunteering as safe and secure as possible for all those involved so that vulnerable people and isolated communities can “rely on mutual aid volunteers when no friends, family or others are nearby.”

We are now preparing for the 1^st sprint of our project and release of the software. We’ve set a fundraising goal of £7000.00 to begin development and although we don’t know how long COVID-19 will be around for we plan to create a solution that will stand the test of the time. You can take a virtual tour of our application here and if you would like to learn more you contact us or visit our crowdfunding page. Every donation helps make this project a reality. After all, like with everything we do it’s all about you.

Acorn is an organisation that believes in “grassroots community organising to run adaptive, locally-driven campaigns in our communities and cities.” The team at Acorn consists of community leaders, members and activists running groups and campaigns across the UK. Acorn believes that the inequalities and indignities we face as part of our personal and social problems are about power.

Acorn feels that the only way we ever see meaningful action is if “we can counter the power of money and big politics with the power of people taking collective action.” This is a view that we also support and have followed Acorn’s work within our community in Bristol for some time.

They feel that online tools and resources can be used to “increase and leverage” power within our communities and to help facilitate offline actions. When Nick Ballard a local organiser for Acorn approached us to discuss an idea he had for a “panic button” mobile application to alert members and groups of friends about illegal evictions and street harassment we were happy to assist.

Being a socially responsible business ourselves we understood the importance of an application that allowed users to send alerts to a group of friends in the event of illegal eviction or other such emergencies. Acorn wanted the app to work across both iPhone and Android platforms.

We knew that this project would require a specialist development team used to work with organisations such as Acorn and who had a strong skillset in mobile application development. We were working on a consultative basis and took the specifications/ requirements for the project before approaching both international and domestic development houses.

Working closely with Nick we searched for the best match for Acorn in line with their budget expectations and requirements, working as a point of contact and beginning initial conversations with prospective companies before finally opening up a dialogue with City Web Consultants in London.

With City web’s experience around mobile application development and most importantly with working with organisations in the same space as Acorn we knew they’d be a great fit, offering not only technical services but support for crowdfunding and fundraising activities for their project.

Acorn’s project is still in early stages but has the potential to become a solution that is used nationally and for us that’s exciting. Now more than ever it’s important that we stand together in our communities against injustices and always strive to do the right thing.

We’ll be sharing fundraising links on our Facebook and Twitter accounts when Acorn has got that side of things together just to show a little solidarity with some of our favourite people and because we believe that everyone deserves their place on earth.