At Fieldfisher, the international law firm, a small orange envelope once helped keep the business moving. Paper travelled between departments. Approvals needed signatures. It was an ordinary office arrangement, right up until ordinary office life disappeared. During lockdown, sending checks around to people’s homes was hardly a workable substitute. A familiar routine had become a bottleneck.
- The job: connect clients, projects, people, and money on Microsoft’s business platform.
- The evidence: Fieldfisher retired 11 legacy applications.
- The catch: better software still asks people to change how they work.
That is a useful entrance into sa.global, a company whose work can otherwise disappear beneath the alphabet soup of enterprise technology. ERP means enterprise resource planning. CRM concerns customer relationships. The practical question is simpler: can the person doing the work and the person sending the invoice see the same business?
01 / The space between the systems
sa.global implements Microsoft business applications and builds software around particular industries. Its customers include lawyers, architects, engineers, accountants, software services firms, and homebuilders. These businesses have different outputs, but a shared coordination problem. A client request becomes a project, consumes someone’s time, generates costs, and eventually becomes revenue. Information must survive every handoff.
Its evergreen platform connects the operational pieces for service businesses: finance, projects or legal matters, people, and clients. HomebuilderONE follows a builder’s work through land, sales, construction, finance, and warranty. Underneath sit Microsoft technologies, including Dynamics 365, Azure, Microsoft 365, and Power Platform. sa.global supplies industry knowledge, software, implementation, and continuing support around that foundation.
This puts it between a software publisher and a consultancy. The customer buys both a system and help making it useful. The distinction matters because a technically successful installation can leave an operational mess perfectly intact.
02 / Eleven switches, one awkward conversation
Fieldfisher offers an unusually concrete result. Microsoft’s customer account documents the retirement of eleven legacy applications after the firm brought operations together using Dynamics 365 and evergreen. Time recording, expenses, and holiday booking could sit within the connected environment. Cloud access also helped employees work remotely when the pandemic disrupted office life.
The uncomfortable part concerned expectations. In a discussion published by sa.global, finance leader Mike Giles described employees hearing the promise of a wonderful system more clearly than the warning that familiar routines would change. The team encountered resistance. Electronic workflows also challenged paper approvals. Lockdown made the limitations of check signing harder to ignore, accelerating an existing shift.
“we turned off 11 legacy software products.”
Mike Giles, Fieldfisher
The lesson is available to anyone planning a replacement: demonstrate the changed working day before celebrating the new features. Who approves an expense now? Where does the exception go? Which familiar step disappears? Those questions belong in the project plan beside data migration.
03 / A subscription with an opinion
sa.global’s answer to the drawn-out implementation is sa.go!, a preconfigured delivery model. In its legal offering, the subscription includes licenses and environments, business processes, implementation tools, testing, training, launch support, and managed services. The proposition is a more bounded project, with reusable configurations and an ongoing commercial relationship.
The homebuilding edition launched in February 2025, with Home Development, Inc. identified as the first deployment. Its offer bundles licensing, implementation, and managed services into a monthly subscription. The current HomebuilderONE program advertises deployment in as little as 26 weeks. Treat that as a proposed delivery path whose applicability depends on scope, rather than a universal stopwatch.
The economic choice is worth spelling out. A bundle moves several purchasing decisions into one relationship. It also asks the buyer to examine how much customization is actually necessary. Stanley Martin Homes provides a useful example: its customer story describes designing processes around the system’s existing functionality to avoid expensive, time-consuming modifications. Departmental stakeholders participated from the beginning.
04 / One ecosystem, several kinds of expertise
Founder and CEO Stephen James built a Microsoft-focused business. That concentration is its market position: understand one technology ecosystem, then go deeper into the workflows of selected industries. HSO is one alternative within the Microsoft partner market. Specialist industry systems offer another route. The choice turns on operational fit as much as features.
The company’s expansion has involved capital and acquisitions. Kartesia provided $50 million in growth financing in January 2022, supporting expansion and the acquisition of Dynamic Consulting in the United States. Later that year, sa.global acquired HomebuilderONE and ReQlogic from DXC. The financing funded the company’s growth; it says nothing about the price of a customer’s implementation.
There is also a corporate-history wrinkle. In January 2021, sa.global publicly clarified that HSO had acquired its legacy US business and products, rather than the entire global group. A familiar company name can conceal a consequential difference in scope.
05 / The next layer needs the first
Today, sa.global positions empower as a decision intelligence layer above its operational foundation, connecting business knowledge with governed AI agents and actions. The idea follows its earlier work: connected information becomes the material for deciding what happens next. Its usefulness should be judged through specific workflows and accountable decisions.
Recent legal engagements show continuing demand for that foundation. Mewburn Ellis selected evergreen in February 2026. In June, sa.global announced a ten-year transformation partnership with TLT covering finance, HR, and practice management. These are announced commitments, with outcomes still to be demonstrated over time.
For a prospective buyer, start with one ordinary transaction. Follow it from intake through delivery to collection. Count the rekeying, approvals, and competing records. Then ask which can disappear. A firm unwilling to standardize its processes, or committed to another technology ecosystem, should question the fit. The orange envelope is a good place to begin: small enough to overlook, consequential enough to redesign.