IT Support for Law Firms
IT support for solicitors built around the duty that actually matters — keeping client matters confidential, retrievable and out of the wrong inbox.
The worst IT day in a law firm is not an outage
Ask most businesses to describe their worst day with technology and they describe downtime. Ask a solicitor and the answer is different. It is the bundle that went to the wrong Mr Patel. It is the mailbox a departed paralegal could still open a fortnight after leaving. It is the closed matter nobody can produce when a client, an insurer or the other side asks for it.
Confidentiality here is not a policy on the website. It is a professional duty, it attaches to individuals as well as to the firm, and it is enforceable. The controls worth having are not the ones that make things faster — they are the ones that make an accidental disclosure harder to commit.
Your case management system runs on a platform. That part is ours.
Firms run all sorts of practice and case management systems. Clio, LEAP, Actionstep, Proclaim and SOS are names you will hear in UK practices, and most firms are attached to whichever one they picked. We are not a reseller, partner or implementation specialist for any of them, and would not claim to know your workflows better than the people who built them.
What all of them have in common is the layer underneath. Identity — who gets in, and how they prove it is them. Storage, whether matter data sits in the vendor’s cloud or on a server in your comms cupboard. Backup, including the copy the vendor is not taking for you. The network, and the laptops people use to reach it. That layer is where most “the system is down” calls begin, and it is the part we look after. Saying quickly whether a fault is the application or the platform under it is worth a morning to a fee earner with a deadline.
Where the system is vendor-hosted, the questions shift rather than disappear. Who holds the administrator account? What happens to your matter data if the contract ends badly? Is anything held outside that one platform? The same goes for your email and documents, which is why independent backup of Microsoft 365 is a separate thing from Microsoft keeping the service running.
Email is where confidentiality actually breaks
Misdirected email is one of the most common ways confidential information leaves a law firm. Not a sophisticated attack — autocomplete. Two clients share a surname. Your clerk and the opponent’s clerk look identical in a dropdown. Someone hits reply-all on a thread with the other side buried in it three messages back.
Nothing removes that risk. Stacked small frictions do reduce it:
- a short delayed send window, so the moment of realisation is still recoverable
- external-recipient warnings, so an address outside the firm looks different before you click
- maintained distribution lists for a matter team, reviewed when people join or leave, instead of a hand-assembled To line
- clearing stale autocomplete entries, so a superseded address stops resurfacing for years
- linking to the document in your system rather than sending a copy that lives permanently in someone else’s mailbox
We handle the technical side — email configuration and protection, and authentication so mail claiming to come from your domain can be checked. Habits are the larger half, which is why training the people who send the email earns its keep in a firm more than in an ordinary office.
Completion day and the bank details that changed
The pattern is well documented in conveyancing and it still works. Late on a Friday, with a chain waiting, an email arrives that appears to come from the firm on the other side. The wording is right. The matter reference is right. The account details for completion monies have changed.
The defence that holds is procedural rather than technical. Bank details get verified by telephone, on a number your firm held before the transaction started — never a number in the email, and never by replying to it. Everyone who touches client money should know that rule cold, and clients should be told in writing at the outset that your own details will not change by email. Technical controls back it up: multi-factor authentication, alerting on lookalike domains, and watching for inbox rules quietly forwarding correspondence elsewhere. But it is the phone call that stops the payment.
Not everyone should see every matter
In most small businesses, shared folders drift towards everyone-can-see-everything and nobody minds. A law firm cannot work that way. Conflicts and information barriers mean access has to be deliberate: this team, this matter, no wider. That is simple to state and tedious to maintain, which is why it decays over a few years of staff changes.
We set permissions around matter teams rather than individuals, so adding or removing a person is one action instead of ten, and we review them instead of assuming they are still right. Departures matter most. Someone leaving for a competitor should lose access at the point their employment ends — account disabled, sessions ended on every device, mailbox preserved but no longer usable, firm data off personal phones. Agree that order before the resignation, not during the handover.
Kept for years, then destroyed on purpose
Retention in legal practice is genuinely awkward. Files have to be kept for long periods, retrieved years later by someone who never worked on the matter, then disposed of properly rather than left to rot on a drive in a cupboard. Formats age. Systems get replaced. An index that only exists inside a retired application is a file you no longer really have. We look at where archived matters live, whether a second independent copy exists, and how destruction happens on purpose — the broader version of that problem is in our guide to how long to keep business data.
Deadlines, hearings and work that happens away from the office
A hearing bundle does not wait for a server. Court and tribunal deadlines make availability non-negotiable in a way an ordinary office never faces, so backup and continuity planning has to answer a sharper question than “will we get the data back”. It has to answer “can this fee earner still file tomorrow morning”. Hybrid working adds its own exposure: confidential papers on a home printer, laptops in transit, a family device used because the firm laptop was slow. Encrypted devices and secure remote access handle part of that. A rule about what may be printed at home handles the rest.
Your compliance obligations stay yours. What we provide is the cyber security and day-to-day managed IT support underneath them — remote for most things, on site across South London, Croydon and Surrey when hands are needed, much of that by our sister company PC Macgicians. If confidentiality is the risk that worries you most, get in touch and tell us what your firm runs.
Frequently asked questions
Do you work with case management systems like LEAP, Clio, Proclaim or Actionstep?
We work on the layer those systems sit on — logins and multi-factor authentication, the network, the devices, the server if yours is hosted in-house, and the backup. We are not a reseller, partner or implementation specialist for any case management product, and we will not pretend to know your workflows better than your supplier does. What we can do is tell you quickly whether a fault is in the application or in the platform under it, and deal with our half properly.
What can you actually do about misdirected email?
Nothing removes the risk, because it is a human error made under time pressure. What helps is stacking small frictions — a short delayed-send window so a mistake can still be pulled back, a visible warning when a recipient sits outside the firm, distribution lists that are maintained rather than assembled by hand, and clearing stale autocomplete entries so old addresses stop offering themselves. We configure those, and we train people on the habit of reading the To line before the attachment.
A fee earner is leaving for a competing firm. What should happen to their access?
Access should stop when their employment does, not at the end of the week. That means disabling the account rather than only changing the password, ending active sessions on every device, converting the mailbox so it can still be searched without being logged into, removing them from matter permissions and distribution lists, and recovering or wiping firm data on personal phones. Agree the sequence before the notice period, not during it.
Can you make our firm SRA compliant, or get us through Lexcel or CQS?
No, and be careful of anyone who says they can. Those are professional obligations and Law Society schemes that belong to your firm and the people responsible for compliance within it. What we provide is the technical evidence underneath them — access controls, encryption, multi-factor authentication, patched devices, an accurate list of what you own, and backups that have been tested. Your COLP still owns the assessment; we make the IT answers easy to give.
Our matter files have to be kept for a very long time. How should that work?
Long retention is a storage problem and a retrieval problem, and the second one catches firms out. A closed file needs to be findable years later by someone who never worked on it, in a format that still opens. We look at where archived matters live, whether a second independent copy exists, whether the index survives a change of system, and how material gets destroyed deliberately at the end rather than left forgotten on an old drive.
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Feedback from clients of our team, including our sister company PC Macgicians, who deliver much of our engineering work. Names withheld at their request.
Areas we cover
IT Support for Law Firms across South London, Croydon and Surrey — on-site where you need it, remote everywhere.
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