Overview

Another year, another Accesspoint Innovators Forum!

The feedback we’ve seen from our 2025 event has left us feeling warm and fuzzy inside. Our hard work has paid off, the last 9 months of organising and planning have been worth it, and so now it’s time to look back at our fourth Innovators Forum (and its highlights).

Scott Brown, Managing Director at Accesspoint

4 years ago we had a wild idea to start our own event, you asked to see more of what we were developing and mentioned how good it would be to have a mutual forum for like-minded firms to get together, collaborate on ideas, share challenges and solutions. We started out with 40 delegates and it’s grown each year, and here we are now, with over 100 delegates. It just shows the power and value of getting together, so thank you all for attending and being part of this journey.”

Our themes this year:

Once again we hosted our event at the beautiful Hanbury Manor Hotel in Ware. This year, we focused on the following themes:

• Designing Software That Inspires Joy and Drives Results
• Creating Tools That Boost Productivity and User Satisfaction
• Empowering People Through Seamless, Productive Experiences
• Where Happy Users Meet High-Performance Software

And what did the agenda look like?

• Rupert Collins-White opened our event with three simple words: People, Products, Purpose; providing key insights into the core challenges of SME law firms from Burlington’s 2025 Frontiers report. If you’ve ever felt that technology gets treated like a bolt-on instead of part of your firm’s DNA, his point was clear: purpose is what makes the difference.
  
• Scott reminded everyone just how far this Forum has come — from 40 people four years ago to more than 100 delegates this year. That growth shows there’s a real appetite for sharing ideas and building solutions together.
  
• Scott and Hong also looked back at what’s been achieved since last year: including new staff, certifications, milestones, and the next stage of Mozaique’s development. A foundation that made the rest of the day’s conversations possible.
  
• Hong then showed Mozaique live, with integrations across Verify365, FormEvo and NetDocuments, plus the upgraded Mozaique Conveyancing Calculator: A dashboard firms can shape to their brand, with control that’s visible every day.
  
• Do I really need a DMS? Kerri Dearing at NetDocuments delved into this question by bringing to the stage Jamie Abrahams at Harold Benjamin, Peter Carr at Lawfront and Sjors Verhage at New Quadrant Partners. Our panellists discussed their reasons for adopting NetDocuments within their firm and provided valuable advice and insights to other firms in the crowd that are considering the question: do I really need a DMS? Read the discussion here.
  
• Why your lawyers STILL hate the new system 🤔 It’s not the tech, it’s the people: Higgsy took centre stage in this discussion that detailed the best practice advice on managing implementations. This followed on nicely from Higgsy’s presentation last year where he delved into how to choose your next PCMS. There’s a full e-booklet on this here.
  
• It was a delight to welcome back Oliver Tromp at Actionstep for our fourth Forum. Oliver delved into why interconnected systems are driving the next phase of the business of law.
  
• Jane, Hayley and Anita presented our first ever LIVE demo of LAM (Legal Aid Manager), our journey so far and the reasons why we’ve developed such an intuitive system for legal aid firms across the UK. We’re so excited about LAM. Our journey is far from over but it was an absolute pleasure to demo this software for our event. We hope everyone is as excited about this as we are.

Every year we present you with a jam-packed agenda, full of demos, fire-side chats and presentations from the likes of NetDocuments, Actionstep, Ochresoft, FormEvo, Synextra, Verify 365, who all operate in the legal tech space and understand the difficulties law firms face. This year was no different.

Do I really need a Document Management Solution?

Do we really need a Document Management System (DMS)? To delve into this, NetDocuments hosted a panel at this year’s Innovators Forum, alongside Accesspoint’s clients: Harold Benjamin, Lawfront and New Quadrant Partners.

Read more

Key take aways

This year’s gathering was more than just another event—it was proof that real, practical change is already happening. From conversations about moving to a cloud-based PMS to firms finally embracing the benefits of a DMS, one thing is clear: change is no longer on the horizon, it’s here. And while many of us instinctively resist it, it’s becoming impossible to ignore.

Firms left feeling valued and understood

Can I take this opportunity on behalf of Kate and myself to thank you and all your colleagues for your hospitality last week at Hanbury Manor.  It was organised to perfection, and I can only imagine the time and hard work it must have taken to arrange every single detail so well. I personally found it very useful, not just the presentations but also being able to talk to some of the other attendees and discuss how they have been handling the issue of dealing with their PCMS, be it moving on to another CMS or finding ways of making their PCMS work better for them.  

I hope that you managed to find time to have a rest this weekend – you certainly deserved it!

Kathryn Shaw, Director at GBH Law

What stood out most this year was the powerful message: you’re not alone. So many firms are asking the same question: “How do we free our fee earners from admin and give them more time to earn?” At the Forum, that sense of isolation disappeared. Firms discovered a community of peers—some already thriving with a cloud-based PCMS, others still on the same legacy system for 30 years. Some had embraced NetDocuments, while others hadn’t touched a DMS. Some were using our Mozaique Conveyancing Calculator to deliver instant quotes, while others were still handwriting them. Some had long adopted our Client Portal, while others were still relying on the post.

That mix created something powerful: authentic conversations, honest insights, and a shared vision of where legal tech is heading. The Forum wasn’t just networking—it was a chance to see the future through the experiences of those already living it.

This way, delegates managed to have valuable, honest conversations with their peers from other firms that are ahead of them in their journey, and really evaluate the benefits of adopting the products demonstrated at our event by hearing first-hand the practical experiences of other practices.

The future for Accesspoint

With such a broad range of skills in our team, it’s easy to lose sight of what lies at the heart of Accesspoint. So, what is our core focus—and how can we help your firm?

At our core, Accesspoint is the bridge between your firm and legal technology. We support firms throughout their entire operational journey, whether you’re working with best-of-breed tools or all-in-one solutions. Think of us as the glue that connects your people, processes, and technology—turning complexity into clarity.

Our core business is built around 5 pillars

PCMS Development & Consultancy

For firms using legacy systems choosing to remain with their platform and looking to maximise the lifespan of the product, we provide and will continue to provide development and support services. We provide annual health checks for your system to advise on best-practices and ensure you are fully utilising your software functionality. We build workflows and reports, we develop time-saving integrations with our partners such as FormEvo, Verify365 and Intelliworks, and we provide bespoke development services to build applications around these systems, to ensure you get the most out of the system.

Actionstep Implementations: On the flip side we support and provide full implementation services for firms looking to migrate away from on-premise solutions and adopt a Cloud Based SaaS platform like ActionStep. We provide full consultancy, data migration, setup, training, integrations and development for an entire Actionstep implementation journey.

NetDocuments Implementations: NetDocuments is a big feature for us, they have an unrivalled DMS and are charting the way forward for firms looking to adopt a cloud based DMS and AI in a controlled manner. We provide full end-to-end implementation of the NetDocuments system and we are the current NetDocuments EMEA partner of the year.

Websites & Marketing

We provide full website design and development services, Search Engine Optimisation and Social Media packages. We help firms bring their online presence up to speed and start leveraging smarter technology around your website, such as connecting your contact enquiry form data directly into a holding bay within your PCMS.

Mozaique: new updates and future plans

Something that we have been busy with is our very own Mozaique software solution. We unveiled our new branding at the event to mark our commitment to taking the platform to new levels.

Mozaique is gaining huge popularity with law firms. It was born with the idea of building a web-application layer on top of your PCMS. So we can use your PCMS data as the single source of truth, but take the data and extend it outwards to create a series of intelligent modules that improve your firms efficiencies and client interaction. We’re so pleased to say it has been a great success in the sector.

Over the past year we have invested heavily into the platform and it’s been adopted by many attendees at the Forum. At the core of Mozaique is our client portal, enabling firms to automatically keep their clients up-to-date throughout the case. We have our Fee-Earner Dashboard software enabling fee-earners to access case information, reports and management information whilst out and about. E-Marketing Suite seamlessly synchronises your client contact data with e-marketing tools like Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor. The Mozaique intranet stores core company documents and information and our digital web-forms digitise client onboarding and ingest the data into your firm’s PCMS. We’ve also been busy developing a whole new suite of tools that we launched at the event and continue to work on post-event. This includes a whole new Legal Aid solution, Conveyancing Calculator tools and enhanced features to our Client Portal.

The popularity of the platform comes from providing extremely useful tools but in a simple, easy to use, joined up approach and most importantly the ability to be rolled out firm-wide in a pain-free manner.

Thank you to our sponsors and attendees

We just want to say a huge thank you to our attendees and especially our sponsors: NetDocuments, Actionstep, Ochresoft, FormEvo, Synextra and Verify 365. Thank you for reminding us that innovation happens when the right systems connect.

Overview

Do I really need a DMS? A panel discussion with NetDocuments and Accesspoint’s clients.

At our 2025 Innovators Forum, Kerri Dearing, VP of International Markets at NetDocuments lead an engaging discussion with law firm leaders who have confidently answered that question. Together, they explore the tangible business value of adopting a modern DMS. From leveraging cloud-first flexibility and enabling seamless PMS integration, to improving efficiency, compliance, and collaboration, this session at our Innovators Event unpacked how a DMS helps firms stay competitive and future-ready. 

Expect honest insights, practical takeaways, and real-world lessons to help you assess whether your firm can afford not to have a DMS.

Hear the answers from our panellists on the day

In the below transcription, we address some of the key take aways from the panel. Our panellists discuss their reasons for adopting NetDocuments within their firm and provide valuable advice and insights to other firms that are considering the question: do I really need a DMS? 

How did you go about getting buy in from the stakeholders and bringing them along on the journey at your firm? 

Sjors Verhage
New Quadrant Partners

Read Sjors’s answer below…

“I think first of all it was trying to convince our colleagues that we do need such a system and why we need this system. So that’s step number one. And of course, there’s also a financial case to present to the leadership team and collecting those arguments together. But also showing your colleagues what you would give back to them. It’s not okay to just throw technology at them and say ‘you use this from this day going forward’. That’s not a solution. So I think it’s both making a business case to your colleagues and the leadership team.”

Jamie Abrahams
Harold Benjamin

Read Jamie’s answer below…

Integrations were really important for Jamie at Harold Benjamin when considering a successful roll out of NetDocuments, as well as working with the right partner. So Kerri invited Jamie to tell the audience about how they went about this at their firm: 

“Integrations were really important to us because we had quite a lot of data that we wanted to migrate, and we felt that we couldn’t do DMS and PCMS in one go because it would’ve been too disruptive. You hear the expression ‘business as usual’ a lot; this means not interrupting lawyers at all and not wasting any of their time. Anything that falls short of that would been problematic, so we had to keep everything running all the time and there was never going to be a good time to do it. 

Our instance of NetDocuments is linked to our current PCMS as a bi-directional integration. It does a lot of the stuff that otherwise you’d have to train people to do. We open a file in DMS, it opens the right content according to case types and other criteria. It can push through our existing PCMS’s scripting such as agendas, documents and things like that, and create them in NetDocs which is useful. It saves hours of work and training by automating those processes. 

It is not widely known that we did a pilot project with an Integration partner, and it didn’t work out, so we did have two attempts at this. I’d love to say I had this all planned out and that it was perfect but on the first go it wasn’t successful. When we re-started the project, we realised almost everything that was in the initial training we could pretty much code out with a good bi-directional integration. That’s why it really worked for us. You try and get it perfect but things do come up when you go live. It’s important to work with the right implementation partner who were able to react quickly to these needs and minimise disruption.”

What impact have you seen since adopting NetDocuments? 

Sjors Verhage
New Quadrant Partners

Read Sjors’s answer below…

“Time saving. I think everyone here in this room wants to focus on ‘How can I make my lawyers and fee earners spend as much time as possible making money and less time looking for documents?’ Because that’s not chargeable time. 

When we went live with NetDocuments we integrated it with Clio which is also a cloud-based PMS. The integration was very important to us. Luckily for us when we generate a document in Clio, put all client data on that form (which is what it can do for us), it mirrors straight into NetDocs into the matter. So giving fee earners the ease to not move documents around and also to be able to look for documents in seconds rather than a few minutes is a huge time saver.”

Peter Carr
Lawfront

Read Peter’s answer below…

“Lawfront’s IT landscape is inherently complex, shaped by an ambitious M&A growth strategy. Our DMS deployment sits within a broader PMS and CMS modernisation programme, designed to deliver a single, integrated platform for over 1,200+ colleagues. One of the quickest wins with NetDocuments has been rolling it out to central functions like Professional Standards and People and Culture. These teams benefit immediately from a shared, centralised resource, enabling standardisation and peer review across the group. Beyond compliance, it’s proving to be a powerful collaboration tool.”

So to answer… do I really need a DMS? 

Peter Carr
Lawfront

Read Peter’s answer below…

“You don’t need a DMS if you can answer ‘Yes!’ to all of the below. So have a think about what you really want out of your documents: 

• Do you trust people to file documents correctly? 
• Do you trust that staff can find content quickly when they need them? 
• Do you trust that they’ll pass on that knowledge when they retire?
• Do you trust your documents are stored securely, available 24/7, with a full audit trail? 

If you don’t, then you need a DMS.”

Sjors Verhage
New Quadrant Partners

Read Sjors’s answer below…

“I would agree. Don’t cheap out on it. It can cost you more money than it costs per year. Really see the added value of Document Management Systems. I think giving your fee earners the ability to find documents in an easy way is really powerful, even if you might trust someone to store them in the right way. So I’ll emphasise again, don’t cheap out.”

Jamie Abrahams
Harold Benjamin

Read Jamie’s answer below…

“I think the last few years have been a really difficult place for IT Directors because you’ve got an infrastructure which is not built around cloud technology and probably works OK and you have to try and explain that to the owners of the business who are probably going to say ‘Why can’t we just stay the same?’. Around 50% of our reasoning behind DMS was to future-proof the infrastructure and move it to native cloud applications. Once this is done, it then makes it much easier to connect to other software solutions and provides more opportunities to the business and supports our expansion.”

To conclude…

Consider everything our panellists have mentioned in the above. Really think about your firm’s efficiencies, time savings and potential future infrastructure changes. With a DMS in place, lawyers and staff can focus less on chasing down files and more on serving clients, which ultimately makes your firm run smoother and smarter.

We hope this article has proved helpful in helping you assess whether your firm can afford not to have a DMS. 

You might be interested in…

Do I really need a Document Management Solution?

Higgsy explores the value of integrating a Cloud-Native DMS with your PMS.

Read more

Come and see us at Inspire EMEA 2025

We’ll be at the NetDocuments Inspire Event on Tuesday 4^th November 2025 as their Diamond Sponsor. We hope to see you there and discuss how NetDocuments could benefit your firm in the same way it has for Harold Benjamin, Lawfront and New Quadrant Partners. 

Last year, the Accesspoint Legal team were thrilled to win the NetDocuments EMEA Partner of the Year Award. We can’t believe how quickly this event has come around once more and look forward to catching up with everyone in London for discussions on the future of legal tech!

Overview

Unveiling Our Journey Since Last Year’s Conference 

Accesspoint’s year end was just last month and last year was certainly the biggest year for us in our company history with significant gains in every area of the business:

Our latest success stories

• We have grown our professional services and data migration teams and have the capacity to fully implement NetDocuments, LEAP and Actionstep.
• We successfully implemented NetDocuments to law firms and in-house legal teams including Harold Benjamin Solicitors, Bimeda Holdings and only last month we went live with over 170 users at Burnetts Solicitors. We were also very pleased to be selected to implement NetDocuments at Lawfront to over 800 users across their 4 regional firms.
• We have taken a number of sites live on Actionstep with more in progress and in the pipeline.

Our Mozaique products continue to grow in demand

Demand for our Mozaique suite of products remains strong and we were pleased to roll this out to firms such as LCF Law, Hunt and Coombs, Osbornes Law, Maurice Turnor Gardner, Kingsfords, Lacey’s, Best Solicitors, Herrington Carmichael and more. This has led to firms wanting to push the product even further. We do our best to listen and we have released some major enhancements to Mozaique which we’ll be able to detail later on in the conference.

We’re working on new websites and digital marketing plans

Our marketing and media team have also grown with development of new websites and digital marketing plans for firms such as HSR Law, Goodman Ray & Thornton Jones with Sternberg Reed, GT Stewart and Prince Evans soon to follow suit.

Training and Consultancy booms

We trained over 2,000 users over the past 12 months from the various new PCMS and DMS implementations as well our New Starter Training which is proving ever more popular. We continue to support firms with consultancy services including report writing, case management workflow development, setting up modules and processes. Still very much bread and butter services for us.

Having said that, we have become more and more agnostic as a provider and have also partnered with other PCMS Suppliers such as SOS, LEAP and Access Legal to build various integrations.

We’ve built solid partnerships

We’ve built and nurtured solid partnerships with leading Legal Tech providers such as NetDocuments, Actionstep, Verify365, PALI, Ochresoft, ReviewSolicitors and FormEvo. Developing very successful integrations that they had previously struggled to achieve.

We continue to invest in UK-based talent

We continue to provide opportunities to young people starting out in their IT careers through our Apprenticeship program. Many of the talented developers and consultants that you have worked with at Accesspoint started out with us as Apprentices including Nesar, Joni, Jamie H and Jamie C and our very popular Mr. Matthew Smith.

Others who joined us still early in their careers such as the fantastic Jack Gilham there, have really started to find their place in the business with Jack now leading our NetDocuments implementations after joining as a Developer only 3 years ago.

We’re always on the look out for specialist Legal Tech talent

We are also always on the look out for specialist talent in the Legal Tech arena as they are always worth their weight in gold. So we were very, very pleased to recruit two key hires in the past few months: Kirran Tariq who some of you may know from her time at Advanced working in the implementations team concentrating on Case Manager training and development as well as Crystal Reports and TaskCentre. She came to us from having recently been at Linetime implementing this and other products such as PracticeEvolve. Hayley Biddlecome then joined us in May. She brings a wealth of knowledge around PCMS systems with a particular skillset in Accounts and Legal Aid, which are very hard to come by these days.

We’ve had a busy year!

So, we have had a very busy year at Accesspoint. And here are just some of the new clients that we signed up this year. A great result.

The one that really stands out is the Team GB logo. This was a really cool project that Scott won through his industry contacts and involved us completely digitising a large stream of their manual processes by developing a bespoke portal and Mobile App for the Paralympic athletes which allows them to select, administer and track their equipment. As you can imagine, there are thousands of athletes and supporting staff with huge warehouses full of equipment that needed to be moved around the world. So it was amazing that we got to be a part of that, and really shows off the diverse skillsets that we have in this business.