Ahmed Shaaban and the trouble with the bill

A barcode is an unlikely place to begin a conversation about lawyers. Ahmed Shaaban went there anyway. Explaining his view of the legal industry in 2017, he described the familiar choreography of a retailer replenishing its stock. An item is scanned. Another is ordered. Commercial terms, supplier relationships and quality checks sit behind an apparently simple transaction. Then he turned to the companies buying legal advice. Why should their dealings with law firms be quite so much harder to connect?

The comparison had a certain cheek. Lawyers sell judgment, experience and the ability to navigate situations for which there may be no precedent. A warehouse sells things that can be counted. Yet Shaaban was interested in the machinery surrounding the expertise: how a client chooses a firm, agrees a price, follows the work and eventually pays. Even an exquisite legal argument has to survive an encounter with accounts payable.

That question runs through his public career as founder and CEO of Fulcrum GT. His business develops the software and operational services behind professional services firms. His recurring subject is the relationship between those firms and their customers. Follow that subject across the years and a portrait emerges of a founder who keeps returning to the commercial consequences of disconnected information.

An engineer at the billing desk

Shaaban studied engineering at Boston University and earned an MBA at Loyola University Chicago. The combination is a useful way into his work: systems on one side, the economics of running a business on the other. He has also been involved in Chicago's technology incubation community. At Fulcrum, his leadership responsibilities include strategic business development, putting him at the meeting point between what enterprise software can do and what professional firms will actually buy.

The world he chose contains a peculiar difficulty. A law firm can operate internationally while its business information remains divided by office, jurisdiction or accounting arrangement. To a client, the firm may look like one organization. To the people trying to assemble a bill, it can resemble a family reunion at which everyone has brought a different currency.

In 2016, Shaaban described the problem through a partner in the United States and a colleague in Britain working on the same matter. Their client wanted flexible billing and timely information. Behind that request sat differences in taxes, languages, statutory reporting and invoice formats. He argued for an enterprise platform capable of handling those differences together. Fulcrum built on SAP, adapting its business software to the practical demands of legal work.

Baker McKenzie was an important reference point in that discussion. Shaaban talked about clients wanting access to work-in-progress information before it was formalized into an invoice. The implication was straightforward: a client should be able to understand a developing commitment while there is still time to manage it. A bill delivered later can describe a surprise with admirable precision. It cannot make the surprise disappear.

The barcode was a serious proposition

By 2017, Shaaban was describing law firms as participants in their clients' supply chains. He pointed to the way large businesses already managed other suppliers through agreed terms, automated transactions and continuing reviews. Legal services, he argued, should be able to participate in that commercial discipline. The advice could remain highly specialized while the transaction became easier to understand.

He illustrated the pressure with a conversation Fulcrum had held with a legal operations leader at a Fortune 50 company. That business was considering reducing its relationships from 550 law firms to 20 or 30. The example was a contemplated change, rather than a completed consolidation. It nevertheless explained why a technology founder would spend so much time thinking about purchasing: a large customer can reshape its suppliers' working lives with a procurement decision.

For Shaaban, the opportunity lay in helping a firm become easier to do business with across borders and departments. The stakes extended beyond getting an invoice out promptly. A client deciding which advisers to retain would also be considering predictability, visibility and whether the relationship worked at the scale of its own organization.

First, rehearse the change

Software ambitions eventually encounter people with actual deadlines. During Norton Rose Fulbright's 2017 move to SAP, Shaaban described involving stakeholders, validating processes and conducting dry runs to check data readiness. Training and change management began at the start of Fulcrum's process. The work involved bringing people and procedures together before expecting them to operate differently.

There is something revealing about that account. A founder selling business transformation could dwell on the finished dashboard. Shaaban was discussing rehearsals in May and June. These are the less photogenic parts of a software project: the trial, the correction, the colleague who needs to see how a familiar job will work on Monday morning. They are also where an ambitious system acquires a chance of being useful.

His explanation of a later Epiq project put willingness near the center of the story. Epiq wanted to use technology for commercial advantage, he said, and that attitude made a substantial change project easier. The lesson in his telling was that the customer's appetite to change mattered alongside the tools being installed. A successful demonstration can be arranged in an afternoon. A willing organization takes considerably more work.

“We worked very closely with people”

Ahmed Shaaban, on the Norton Rose Fulbright implementation, 2017

Six years to cross the gap

In August 2023, Fulcrum launched RAPIDx, a platform connecting corporate legal departments with legal service providers from selection through payment. Shaaban said the company had begun collaborating with corporate departments and law firms six years earlier. The timing puts the development effort alongside his public argument about legal supply chains. The phrase had become a product brief.

His explanation of the launch focused on a change in the buyer. Corporate legal departments were taking a more active interest in their outside counsel relationships and the information those relationships generated. Firms, in turn, needed to adapt to more sophisticated customers. RAPIDx was designed to connect sourcing, pricing, matters, invoices and payments within that relationship.

The ambition required colleagues working on both sides of the transaction. Dino Eliopulos, Fulcrum's vice president of innovation and solutions, helped articulate the platform's commercial vision. Eversheds Sutherland's CFO Julian Lee linked the firm's use of Fulcrum to its longer-term business and client relationship plans. Shaaban was building in a community where a product's promise had to make sense to the buyer and the provider at the same time.

Recognition followed. Fulcrum appeared at No. 2,417 on the 2023 Inc. 5000 and No. 59 on the 2024 Inc. Regionals Midwest list. In 2024 it placed seventh in Fast Company's Business Services innovation category. These were company distinctions, reflecting work by a wider team. Shaaban's response emphasized that team's effort and its attention to clients' changing needs.

A founder who can hold the conversation

A smaller encounter gives the business story a human scale. Writing about an opportunity at Fulcrum in 2018, Alan Shimp recalled visiting its offices and meeting the senior team. His account of meeting Shaaban was amusingly unequal: the CEO spoke, and Shimp listened. Shimp added that he was happy with the arrangement because he found what Shaaban had to say more interesting than his own prospective contribution.

It is one visitor's impression, though an appealing glimpse of a founder in full explanatory flow. It fits the public interviews in one observable respect: Shaaban has a developed argument about how the industry works, and plenty to say about how it could work differently. A conversation about legal technology can quickly become a conversation about the architecture of a business relationship.

That makes his strategic business development role unusually central to the story. A platform connecting two organizations needs agreement about more than a feature list. Buyers and providers have to decide what information to exchange, what a price means and how to handle the work as it changes. His interviews keep moving between these commercial questions and the systems meant to support them. The continuity gives his public career a particular shape: years spent explaining why the details that frustrate individual employees belong in a larger conversation about how firms compete.

Now the question is trust

By 2026, his public agenda included AI oversight and the reliability of business systems. A Doon Insights keynote was announced under the theme of operational integrity and the economics of trust. In remarks ahead of ILTACON that year, he called for education, change management and human involvement in AI deployments. His name also appeared in Ari Kaplan's May 2026 conversations at the CLOC Global Institute.

The vocabulary has changed since the barcode analogy. The underlying concern is familiar. Who can see the information? Who understands the process? Who is responsible when a tool produces an answer? Shaaban's insistence on people and preparation has a clear precedent in those implementation rehearsals years earlier. New software brings new questions into an organization that still has to get its ordinary work done.

His stated ambition is to make legal commerce more connected, transparent and efficient. The interesting part is where he places the effort: among the agreements, records, rules and handoffs that keep a professional relationship functioning. Law firms earn their reputations through expertise. Shaaban has built his working argument around what happens when that expertise has to become a dependable business transaction. Eventually, somebody has to send the bill. He would like everyone to recognize it when it arrives.