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 problems the firm had been living with so long they’d stopped seeing them.
- Internet: roughly $1,000 a month for 100 Mbps — the same speed, at the same price, unreviewed for fifteen years.
- Wi-Fi: a home-grade modem buried in a back-corner rack, covering about a third of the office. No password.
- Files: every client file on a physical server sharing an open network folder — no password, no monitoring. For a firm bound by client confidentiality.
- Network: uploading a single 1 GB file took about an hour. Lawyers would start a transfer and leave for a coffee break — every day, multiple lawyers.
- Phones: a legacy hybrid PBX charging around $500 a month for just two concurrent calls.
- Hardware: ageing computers that couldn’t safely multitask during file transfers, plus an unreviewed managed-print contract.
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 — better speed, materially lower cost, after fifteen years untouched
- Built a proper UniFi network: full office coverage, secured, segmented, and monitored
- Migrated every file off the open server and into Microsoft 365 — SharePoint and OneDrive, with proper access control
- Replaced the PBX with Microsoft Teams Phone: from ~$500/month for 2 concurrent calls to ~$300/month for 5–10, with a direct number for every staff member
- Refreshed the ageing hardware across the board
- 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
Internet, phones, the retired server, the print contract: recurring monthly costs came down across several line items at once. 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 $350–$750 an hour, costs the firm a fraction of that — 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 each of roughly six lawyers. 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 closed
The open Wi-Fi was closed. Client files came off a password-less server. And once we were embedded, the proactive layer started paying off: we caught a staff member uploading client documents to an unapproved AI tool — on a personal account that would have retained access to those documents after they left. A potential breach of client confidentiality, caught before it became one.
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.