In late 2016, North Carolina law firm Cranfill, Sumner & Hartzog was short-staffed. This isn’t exactly a rare occurrence for many law firms, but when the firm’s billing director and e-billing director both left at the same time, a mini-crisis occurred. It also didn’t help that the firm’s finance team had switched to an entirely new technology platform, Thomson Reuters’ Elite 3E, about a year prior.
A normal solution would be having the rest of the finance department pick up the slack. The firm could have also used temporary workers, or a consultant. But what ended up happening was perhaps something unusual—a conversation with the Elite 3E sales representative.
