Selection and implementation
Requirements, a shortlist, data migration from legacy legal office software programs, and training, with the vendor configuring its own product.
IT for law firms: legal practice management software, security and support
Legal practice management software runs a law firm's matters, time, billing and trust accounting. Arke Technologies, in Johannesburg, helps South African law firms and in-house legal teams choose it, integrate it with accounting and documents, protect privileged data and FICA records under POPIA, and support every user under one SLA.
What legal practice management software must handle in South Africa
Legal practice management software in South Africa has to meet local rules that generic or imported legal management software often handles poorly. Check each of these before you shortlist:
- Trust accounting. The Legal Practice Act 28 of 2014 and the Legal Practice Council's rules govern how trust money is held, recorded and reconciled, and the trust account is audited annually. Your legal accounting software must keep business and trust ledgers apart and produce the reconciliation and audit evidence without re-keying.
- FICA. Attorneys who hold trust money or assist clients with certain transactions are accountable institutions under the Financial Intelligence Centre Act, so client due diligence, risk ratings and records, kept for at least five years, must be evidenced.
- POPIA and privilege. Client files carry personal and privileged information. Access should follow the matter, and a breach must be reported to the Information Regulator and the people affected.
- Court and Deeds Office processes. Electronic filing and digital case files in the High Court, and electronic deeds registration as it is rolled out, change how documents move and where they are stored.
- Local billing formats. Party-and-party and attorney-and-client bills of costs for taxation, and the e-billing formats some corporate clients now require.
- Load-shedding and connectivity. Online legal software is only as available as your power and internet link, so the office needs backup power and a second business connection.
How Arke supports legal software and law-firm IT
Your legal software company supports its application. We run everything around it, and we work with the vendor when a fault spans both, so the firm has one number to call.
Managed IT services for law firms
A service desk, laptops, printers, scanning and dictation, patching, and monitoring that checks each computer every 15 minutes and logs faults as tickets automatically. See managed IT services.
Documents and email
Matter-centred filing in SharePoint and Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, with retention rules, search and email filing, so a legal document software gap does not become a shared-drive mess.
Legal accounting integration
Links between your practice system and accounting software such as Sage, Xero or Pastel, so fees, disbursements and trust entries are captured once.
Security and POPIA
Microsoft 365 hardening, conditional access, email security and POPIA compliance records.
Custom software for legal matters
Client portals, intake forms and workflow the packages do not cover, built by our software development team.
Hardware and connectivity
Laptops, servers and network equipment through Server Hub, our hardware division; business fibre and LTE through Fibre Boyz, our connectivity division.
Payment fraud, ransomware and the other risks law firms carry
Firms that practise conveyancing, litigation and commercial law move large sums through trust accounts, which makes them targets. A common attack is business email compromise: a criminal takes over or imitates a mailbox and sends a client new bank details for a transfer or settlement. Another is ransomware, which stops the firm working and puts privileged files at risk.
We reduce both with multi-factor authentication and conditional access, email authentication (SPF, DKIM and DMARC) and filtering, privileged-access controls, and backups kept out of an attacker's reach and restore-tested. Staff training covers confirming changed bank details by phone. In-house legal departments and public-sector legal teams get the same controls, with legal hold and records retention added. Our managed security operations in South Africa cover Microsoft 365 hardening, Microsoft Sentinel and Entra ID governance.
AI in legal software, with privilege protected
AI can summarise a bundle, draft a first letter or search precedents in seconds. It also raises questions a firm must answer: where privileged text goes, whether a model learns from it, and who checks the output. We configure document intelligence and AI assistants on the principle that AI recommends and people decide: every output is explainable, every AI action is logged, and client data is never used to train a model without explicit consent.
Our own platform for professional services firms, AtlasOS, is live for accounting, audit and payroll practices. The legal version, covering matter management, trust accounting integration and FICA compliance tracking, is in scoping. See AtlasOS for legal practices or visit the AtlasOS site (opens atlaspractice.app).
Governance, reporting and continuity
- Service-level agreement. Scope, exclusions, on-site policy and term are fixed before work starts. Incidents are prioritised from P1 (critical outage) to P4 (low-impact request), with response and resolution targets matched to the impact of downtime and agreed in your SLA.
- Monthly service review and report for the managing partner or practice manager: tickets, trends, security posture, backup restore tests and open risks.
- Change control and escalation. Documented runbooks, a named service lead and a written escalation path.
- Confidentiality. Every remote session is approved and logged, and everyone with access to your systems is bound by confidentiality and our security controls.
- Board-level governance. For larger firms and corporate legal departments, reporting that supports technology and information governance under King IV Principle 12.
- Continuity and exit. Delivery is remote-first on our own tooling, by a certified team under one contract, with your systems documented as we go. The firm owns its data, credentials and documentation, and when a contract ends we hand over in an orderly way.
What law-firm IT costs, and what drives it
Last reviewed: September 2026.
We price managed IT per user per month, set after an assessment, and quote project work, such as a practice-system migration, per project. Published South African managed IT rates run from about R180 to R400 per user per month (matnet.co.za, September 2026), with some providers listing R450 (MiBOT, September 2026).
Legal software is licensed separately by its vendor, usually per user each month or as a licence with annual maintenance. What drives your total is the number of users and offices, the size and quality of the data to migrate, the integrations, and whether the system runs in the cloud or on your own server. Free tools exist, including free legal billing and case management software, but they rarely handle South African trust accounting, and they seldom include support, backups or an audit trail.
Buying from Arke
Level 1
B-BBEE contributor
135% procurement recognition
Arke Technologies (Pty) Ltd, a registered company since 2017, is a Level 1 B-BBEE contributor (sworn affidavit available on request), which gives your firm 135% procurement recognition on its own scorecard. Company documents and a bank confirmation letter are available on request, as are our Central Supplier Database number and SARS tax compliance status for public-sector legal departments. You can buy through a proposal and signed SLA, a purchase order or a tender response, and we complete standard bidding documents (SBD forms) when a tender requires them. See company facts, or read how we serve accounting and professional services firms and financial services among the industries we serve.