6 ways your firm can gain a competitive edge through a managed service approach to IT

The legal sector’s uptake of outsourced IT solutions – services hosted or managed by third parties - has been steady but unspectacular to date. Understandably, the onus so far has been on lightening the administrative and housekeeping load, minimising the need for expensive hardware implementations and maximising valuable time. The emergence of cloud-based services over recent years has added a new dimension to the outsourcing picture, but it’s less clear whether it’s added any dynamism.

The latest Legal IT Landscapes report from Legal Support Network (LSN), Legal IT Landscapes 2015 Top 100 firms report indicates that it could take two years for migration rates of key legal applications to the Cloud (think PMS, CMS, DMS, CRM etc.) to hit the 60% mark. ‘Could’ being the operative word because, in a follow up question, over half of respondents answered either ‘undecided’ or ‘not very likely’ to the question ‘How likely is your firm to adopt Cloud-based solutions for its significant systems?’

But is this hesitancy misguided?  Today, there is a greater motivation than ever for law firms to make the move from on-premise to off-premise IT solutions. And that’s largely because the off-premise proposition has matured to such an extent. Many off-premise providers have been successful in transforming themselves from ‘old school’ IT commodity providers to valued IT partners. Rather than forcing organisations into wholesale adoption of cloud, their focus has been on encouraging the judicious use of multiple services as part of a hybrid on/off premise IT environment.

It's time law firms - and more specifically their IT departments - started taking broader advantage of the richer propositions now available from off-premise/managed specialists operating in the cloud. Here are our top tips, outlining how they can best do this.

1.Be open to new ways of effecting rapid change

If you are a CIO in a law firm or a member of the IT team, you’ll recognise the pressure on the one hand to innovate and differentiate, and on the other to save money and deliver efficiencies. And yet capital constraints and legacy infrastructure are gross inhibitors; lengthy procurement cycles breed inertia, and protracted provisioning undermines confidence and buy-in.

Don’t be blindsided by all of this.