The entry point
JK Lawyers came to us with one specific problem. Their website had been built and hosted by a third party, and after a falling out, that company locked them out and went silent. They needed the site rebuilt — and they never wanted to be hostage to a provider again.
So we rebuilt it on a platform they could manage themselves, with no lock-in. Job done. But while we were on-site, we asked a simple question: “Mind if we take a look at a few other things around the office?”
What the audit found
They’d asked for a website. What they got was a systematic review of their entire technology environment — and a list of inefficiencies and ageing systems the firm had been living with so long they’d stopped seeing them.
- Internet: roughly $1,000 a month for a 100/100 plan — the same speed, at the same price, unreviewed for over a decade.
- Network: every workstation on a 10/100 connection. A single 1 GB file took about an hour to move — lawyers would start a transfer and leave for a coffee break.
- Wi-Fi: a consumer-grade modem buried in a back-corner rack, covering only about a third of the office.
- File storage: client files still living on an ageing on-prem server that had outgrown the firm — without the access control, backup and monitoring a modern cloud platform brings.
- Software: core systems — including the practice-management platform — were years past their supported life and overdue for a modern, cloud-based replacement.
- Phones: a legacy hybrid PBX charging around $500 a month for just two concurrent calls.
- Runaway contracts: a pay-per-print contract whose volume compounded around 25% a year — from ~$150 a month at signing to nearly $1,000 — plus ageing computers replaced only on failure.
None of this was incompetence. It’s what happens in every busy firm: problems get normalised, workflows grow around them, and nobody is ever asked to look at the whole picture.
What we did
- Replaced the internet plan — off the old 100/100 service onto a faster 250/250 fibre connection at a fraction of the cost
- Built a proper UniFi network: full office coverage, secured, segmented and monitored
- Migrated client files into Microsoft 365 (SharePoint and OneDrive) with proper access control and backup — and consolidated onto Business Premium, which let us retire the ageing on-prem server entirely
- Replaced the PBX with Microsoft Teams Phone: from ~$500/month for 2 concurrent calls to ~$350/month for up to ten, with a direct number for every staff member
- Refreshed the surveillance with modern UniFi cameras
- Modernised the software stack — moved practice management to Smokeball (current, cloud-based and secure), tidied up licensing, and rolled out proper password management with single sign-on
- Upgraded the meeting rooms for remote work with Microsoft Teams Rooms, replacing decade-old laptops
- Wrote and enforced the firm’s first IT policy — software approval, data handling, acceptable use
The numbers, in three layers
Layer 1 — recurring costs cut
A line-by-line review of every recurring cost turned up savings across the board: internet down sharply on a faster service, the phone system from ~$500 to ~$350 a month for far more capacity, a runaway print contract reset to a fixed plan, and the on-prem server, failover appliance and old firewall retired entirely once everything moved to Microsoft 365. Some spend deliberately went up — modern, compliant, properly-licensed software — and total recurring IT costs still fell sharply. This layer alone went a long way toward covering our fee, before a single workflow improved.
Layer 2 — billable time recovered
Here’s the mechanics of a law firm: a lawyer’s time bills at $330–$750 an hour — and the admin a lawyer does themselves bills at exactly zero. The slow network, hour-long transfers and ageing machines were eating that time daily.
Removing the friction returned one to two hours a day to every lawyer in the firm. Even on a deliberately conservative reckoning — one hour a day, at the bottom of the rate range — that’s hundreds of thousands of dollars of recoverable billable capacity every year. It dwarfs everything else in this story.
Layer 3 — risk reduced
For a firm bound by client confidentiality, getting the security and compliance posture right mattered most — and the modernisation brought it up to current best practice. Client data moved onto a managed cloud platform with proper access control and backup, the network was secured and monitored, ageing software was replaced with supported, current systems, and proper password management with single sign-on was rolled out across the firm.
Being embedded is part of the protection, too. A partner who lives in your systems day to day catches things early — spotting an unsanctioned tool slipping into a workflow, for instance, and shutting it down before it becomes a problem.
Where it landed
JK Lawyers moved onto a managed partnership: a fixed monthly cost, guaranteed availability, and every technology decision flowing through one partner who knows the firm inside-out. Proactive maintenance happens in the background during quiet periods; problems get caught early; and when the firm wants to make a decision, they call us first.
The lesson we re-learn on every engagement: the entry point rarely defines the scope. They asked for a website. What they needed was someone to finally look at everything.