MSI Legal & Accounting Network
MSI Legal & Accounting Network Worldwide (MSI) was formed in 1990 in response to the growing need for cross-border cooperation between professional service firms.
MSI has become a leading global multidisciplinary network of over 250 independent legal and accounting firms in 100 countries throughout the Americas, Asia-Pacific and Europe, Middle East and Africa.
MSI consistently achieves one of the strongest one of the strongest rates of growth among the international networks of independent professional firms as a result of its:
Ability to offer a membership that is evenly balanced between independent law and accounting firms and in an extensive number of countries
Members achieving strong organic growth across their practice groups year on year
How it all started ..
When MSI approached YARG in 2001, they already had a website developed by another company, written in Microsoft ASP with over 2000 pages of Front Page content. MSI felt that they weren’t getting the service they or their clients deserved, the vendor was costly and their solutions weren’t future proof.
It’s always harder to take on a site that’s been written by another company but YARG rose to the challenge. The site had hard wired content and style, no consistency “behind the scenes” and it was a bit of a maintenance nightmare.
Rather than saying that we needed to do a rewrite, which would evidently cost MSI even more money and time, YARG’s team of developers worked with what was given. The first release of the solution gave a completely new look and feel, using the same site content but the actual structure of the site we still weren’t happy with due to the previous vendors design.
With each release, the site became a stronger online presence, updating the technologies and design to give flexibility and future proofing.
We are all very proud of the current version. Finally, it has no old vendor code or design and all the content has been moved to a bespoke CMS system, based on the clients needs.
MSI sees benefits!
The article below was taken from
International Accounting Bulletin, March 14th 2007
MSI sees benefits in new website
MSI Legal & Accounting Network Worldwide (MSI) chief executive James Mendelssohn said he has been surprised by the increased number of membership queries the network has received since revamping its website earlier this year.
Mendelssohn told IAB that, previously MSI received about one-third of queries from the website, one-third from existing firms and one-third from its own research. Since the launch of the new website, however, the percentages have changed in favour of the website. He said: “It seems that perhaps when [potential member firms are] trawling through half a dozen [network] websites, if they then want to approach two or three networks to see if there is any interest, it would seem that we get onto the list more often than we used to.”
Mendelssohn said much of the interest which has been generated from the new look has come from practitioners in developing countries who have “left big firms, have started on their own, they’ve been going for a year or two and they think they need some sort of international link”. Looking at network websites is part of their selection process.
He added: “A fresh new website just made a huge differnence.”
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Technologies Used
The latest version of MSI was built using C# and ASP.NET 2.0 using SQL server as the backend database. For the past two releases MSI staff use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system called Pivotal and to interact between the two systems the MSI site uses YARG's Pivotal Integration Framework 2.0. Content management is via YARG's Content Management System (CMS).
As well as a number of exclusive features and content, members can book conferences and events online, using World Pay to handle the financial transactions.