5 Warning Signs Your Law Firm Needs a New Managed IT Service Provider
If you found your way onto our website, you most likely have been having a rough time when it comes to IT support. And if you’ve found this blog, you’re likely doing some research about what a change could look like. Imagine a month without any technical issues – how does this impact your bottom line? What about your employee productivity and morale?
On the flip side, what happens to your bottom line and employee productivity when things go wrong in the IT department? If you’re ready to seriously consider a change, don’t wait! Here’s 5 Warning signs that your law firm needs a new Managed IT Services Provider:
1. You’re waiting longer than one business day for a response on any issue.
There’s no excuse for a lawyer, a person who generates value via their services (and time) to be sitting idle, losing out on billable hours due to a technology issue. If your provider doesn’t recognize the importance of time in the legal service industry, they have a fundamental lack of understanding about your business model. Meeting deadlines is critical to your firm and clients – your IT provider should hold the same standards and attitude towards service.
One business day response times are acceptable but come with obvious downsides. Two- or Four-hour response times are industry standard for MSPs. Mature law firms typically expect a response from their IT support in less than 30 minutes.
2. Your staff try to fix technical issues themselves before reaching out to IT support.
When staff have low confidence in their IT support teams, productivity goes down. Instead of submitting a request to the IT support team and getting a prompt resolution, staff (young associate lawyers are especially guilty of this) may spend up to two hours googling for a solution to their problem before finally relenting, submitting a ticket, and waiting several hours for a response… Finally, a day or two later, the issue may or may not be resolved.
This is an administrative burden – a loss of time that carries a calculable and tangible loss for your firm. There’s likely already more of this going on than you’d like, and while it’s a part of running a law firm, your IT department’s responsibilities should not be bleeding into your staff’s time. At the end of the day, every minute that a lawyer is forced to exhaust on administrative burden is a minute that negatively impacts your bottom line.
3. Your provider points their finger at software or internet/phone service providers.
First, if you’re reading this as a partner at a law firm, let me switch to first person writing for a second to say that you shouldn’t be hearing about IT issues. As your Managed IT Provider, it’s also your provider’s job to manage IT vendors. Finger-pointing isn’t an acceptable resolution method. Managing your firm’s IT vendors doesn’t just mean installing the software for you or plugging in the modem, it means taking total ownership over all correspondence between your firm and the vendor, liaising support issues from start to finish, and holding IT vendors accountable using our technical expertise and business knowledge so that you don’t have to.
4. You feel like you’ve outgrown your provider, or they’ve outgrown you.
For some reading this, it could have been three, five, ten or even fifteen years since your firm first started working with your existing IT provider. If you were around when they were hired, you probably even feel a little bit nostalgic about when you first started working with them… but as you think harder, the nostalgia fades and you’re faced with the reality of their customer experience today. Either you’ve matured as a company and they haven’t, or they’ve become bloated and in practice are inefficient. Maybe your provider has a lot of employee turnover and failed to maintain a consistent strategy. Whatever the reason is, you probably have a gut feeling that it’s time for a change.
5. Your provider doesn’t understand law firms and isn’t able to make technology investments align with your business goals.
We saved the best for last – this is the most common reasons law firms switch IT providers. Whether it’s because your provider isn’t compliant enough for your cyber insurance or they simply don’t value your time… if you’re working with a generic IT provider that has no specialization in law firms, it’s probably obvious to you and your staff at this point that your provider can’t formulate a winning technology strategy for your firm.
