How We Moved a London Law Firm to the Cloud Without Losing a Single Billable Hour

About the Business

Our client is a well-established legal practice in Central London, specialising in commercial property and corporate law. With around 35 fee earners and support staff, the firm handles highly sensitive client data every day, from contracts and financial disclosures to privileged correspondence. They had been running the same on-premise server setup for over seven years, supported by a previous IT provider who had largely left things on autopilot.

The Challenge

When we were first brought in for a routine health check, the state of the infrastructure was concerning. The firm was running two physical servers in an office cupboard, both well past their expected lifespan. There was no redundancy. If either server failed, the practice would grind to a halt, and there was no tested backup or disaster recovery plan in place. The email system was hosted locally, meaning remote access was clunky and unreliable. Staff working from home or in court had to rely on VPN connections that frequently dropped, and there was no way to collaborate on documents in real time. The firm's managing partner described it as working with one hand tied behind their back. To make matters worse, the firm was paying a significant monthly retainer to their previous provider for what amounted to very little proactive management. The servers had not been patched in months, antivirus definitions were out of date, and there was no monitoring in place. The firm knew they needed to modernise but were worried about disruption, data loss, and the cost of getting it wrong.

Our Solution

The Outcome

The migration was completed in full over a single weekend. When staff arrived on Monday morning, everything worked. Email was faster, files were accessible from anywhere, and the clunky VPN was gone. Within the first week, several solicitors commented that it was the smoothest technology change they had ever experienced. The firm's monthly IT costs dropped by 60%, largely because they no longer needed to maintain, cool, and insure physical servers. Their disaster recovery position went from non-existent to fully tested and documented, which proved invaluable when their cyber insurance came up for renewal. Hybrid working, which had been a source of frustration, became seamless. Fee earners could draft documents on a train, join client calls from home, and access case files securely from court. The firm's managing partner told us it felt like the practice had jumped forward five years overnight. More importantly, the firm now has confidence that their data is protected, their systems are monitored, and their IT partner is genuinely looking after them. That peace of mind is worth more than any single piece of technology.

Services Provided