Case Studies
Linetime help LCL gain advantage over their competitors
The LCL Group of law practices was established 18 months ago to provide commercial insolvency legal work. The Group has offices in Bradford, Leeds, Manchester and London with the Bradford Office, LCL Collections Limited, dealing with debt recovery.
The opening of the Bradford office coincided with the launch of Linetime’s Managed Service Provision (MSP) and LCL became one of the first subscribed users. With MSP, Linetime provides clients with all hardware, system software and application software required (in this case Debtime SQL) as a fully managed service - for a fixed cost, per user, per month.
As a practice grows, additional users can be added – all the client will pay is the monthly cost for the additional user. Linetime also supply any additional hardware required and all clients are supported remotely from Linetime’s Leeds Support Centre.
LCL and Linetime have agreed contract terms for a three-year initial period during which time LCL will automatically be up-graded to the latest software developments as and when they occur. Maintenance costs are included in the managed service charge, enabling LCL to budget accurately and further control their future costs.
Ian Longbottom, one of LCL’s directors comments: “As a new start-up business we needed to set up quickly in order to be able to establish and service our clients. With any new business there is a lot of initial investment and we therefore had to look at prioritising our needs. We wanted to take advantage of the latest and most up-to-date technology but could not afford to go to the expense of employing dedicated in-house IT staff nor did we want the responsibility of managing our own system.”
Mr Longbottom and two other directors of LCL have all had experience of working with Linetime and were confident of the systems and service the company provides.
Mr Longbottom continues: “We decided opting for MSP was more effective for us and it would also allow us to work closely with Linetime to create the sort of debt recovery system we wanted. We were fortunate to be one of the first users of MSP and were thus able to request a number of options specific to our business. This partnership has created acost-efficient, fully functioned debt recovery system. The Liberate-Online web access module integrated into Debtime SQL allows clients to look at and manage their case, real time, via the Internet – a real customer benefit.
“There is little doubt MSP has given us an advantage over our competitors and this edge has allowed us to attract business. We are in a service industry and we need to give our clients the best possible service”, concludes Mr Longbottom.