Harris Fowler
Full case volume protected. Zero disruption. A complete integration rebuild the team never had to think about.
Harris Fowler handles personal injury claims on a no-win, no-fee basis. Speed is built into their model. The faster a claim moves through the system, the sooner a client gets a result and the firm gets paid. When something disrupts that throughput, the financial consequences are immediate.
The Problem
Most personal injury claims in England and Wales pass through a single government-mandated platform: the Ministry of Justice's Claims Portal. For firms operating at volume, the integration between their case management system and that portal is not a convenience. It is the pipeline their entire business runs through.
When that pipeline breaks, case volume does not slow down. It stops.
The Challenge
Two independent events that coincided at the worst possible moment
Harris Fowler had been managing Claims Portal submissions through their existing case management system, Visual Files, via an integration built by a third-party provider called Zylpha. That integration worked. It was fast, it was familiar, and the team had years of practice using it.
Then two things happened at once. Zylpha stopped supporting the integration. And independently, the Claims Portal migrated from an older SOAP-based API to a modern REST API. The two events combined meant the existing integration was not just unsupported: it was going to break.
Harris Fowler could not simply wait it out. With no working integration, their only option would have been to submit claims manually through the portal website. That was slower, more error-prone and completely incompatible with the volume of cases they were processing.
The alternative was worse than the problem
The other option on the table was switching case management systems entirely. That would have meant learning new software, rebuilding processes from scratch, retraining staff and losing the institutional knowledge baked into years of Visual Files customisation. The risk, the cost and the disruption would have been significant. And it would have needed to happen fast.
A legacy system that only a few people understood
Visual Files is a mature, heavily customised platform. The integration Zila had built ran as a series of scripts inside the Visual Files application itself, layered on top of a decade of accumulated changes from multiple developers. Understanding it well enough to rebuild it, without breaking anything in the process, was a substantial technical challenge.
The Solution
The Curve reverse-engineered the existing integration, rebuilt the underlying communication layer for the new API, and delivered the change without the Harris Fowler team noticing anything had changed.
Rather than replace Visual Files or introduce a new system, The Curve wrote a new application that sits alongside Visual Files on every client machine. It takes the output that Visual Files has always produced, translates it into the REST format required by the new Claims Portal API, and handles all 190-plus points of contact between the two systems. From the user's perspective, the submit button still works exactly as it always did. What changed was entirely under the bonnet.
The rollout was phased: a small group of users ran both systems in parallel first, with a fallback available if anything needed attention. There were a small number of teething issues in the early days, none of which prevented the team from working. The firm switched over fully without disruption to operations.
Our Approach
Phase 1:
Understanding a system built by others, over many years
The starting point was getting under the skin of an integration that had been built incrementally over a long period, by people who were no longer involved. The Curve mapped the full scope of the existing Zylpha integration, identified the components that could be retained within Visual Files itself, and isolated exactly what needed to change.
That forensic understanding of the legacy system made it possible to draw a clean boundary: preserve what works, replace only what has to change.
Phase 2:
Rebuilding the integration layer without touching the user experience
The goal was deliberate invisibility. Harris Fowler's staff had spent years working in a particular way. The Curve's brief was not to improve that workflow from the user's perspective, but to ensure it kept working. The new application handles all communication with the Claims Portal in the background, translating Visual Files output into the REST format the portal now requires across all 190-plus API calls, with no change to the steps the user follows.
Phase 3:
Improving what could be improved
While working inside Visual Files to build the new integration, The Curve identified opportunities to tighten up parts of the codebase that had grown unwieldy over time. Field validation, error handling and a number of background processes were refined as part of the same body of work. None of it changed what the team experienced day to day. It made the system more robust, more reliable and easier to support going forward.
Phase 4:
A phased go-live with no fallback required
The rollout ran both systems simultaneously for a short period, giving the team an option to revert if problems emerged. The switch to the new integration was smooth enough that staff asked whether anything had actually been done.
The Results
Full case volume protected: Harris Fowler process an average of 75 claims per month through the portal. With integration, each claim takes between 3 and 7 minutes to submit. Without it, the same submission takes between 12 and 27 minutes manually. That difference compounds at volume. Had Harris Fowler been forced to submit manually, their monthly throughput would have fallen from 75 claims to around 19. A reduction of 75%. The time recovered by fee earners through integration is also time available for other billable activity. The Curve's work did not just protect claim volume. It protected the capacity of the people processing them.
Zero disruption to a live, high-volume operation: The migration from one integration to another happened without a single reported incident. Staff noticed no difference in how they worked. The only visible change was a progress bar update on the submit button. For a firm processing claims at scale, continuity of this kind has direct commercial value.
A modernised foundation with less technical debt: Beyond the integration itself, the codebase Harris Fowler relies on is in better shape than when The Curve arrived. Validation logic, error handling and background processes were improved as part of the engagement, leaving the firm with a system that is cleaner, easier to support and better positioned for future changes.
When Harris Fowler faced a forced migration with a hard deadline and no appetite for disruption, The Curve did the technical heavy lifting entirely out of sight. The systems changed. The team did not have to.
"Have you actually done any work?"