By Lee Wrall, Director, Everything Tech
It’s now more than two years since the true nature of the pandemic became apparent and the Prime Minister solemnly told the nation that they “needed to stay at home”. Overnight, the working landscape in every office-based sector changed forever.
The hybrid working split between home and the office is now the norm for a lot of fields, but the legal industry is struggling to keep pace with how employees want to work.
Many law firms are yet to fully transition to Cloud-based technology which makes hybrid working possible. They have kept faith in traditional IT setups and applications like case management system Proclaim, the installation of which required the significant investment of an on-premise server.
This initial investment made in a pre-pandemic world has made firms reluctant to commit further sums on secure Cloud environments. But members of staff at practices are no different to those in any other industry – they’re crying out for flexibility in their working lives. And in order to meet their demands, firms are going to have to transition.
One such firm which made the transition to the Cloud was Brandsmiths, which now works remotely using an infrastructure built in MS Azure. It’s completely secure and allows the firm’s users to access Proclaim from anywhere in the world.
The advantages of an infrastructure like this, which uses Azure, don’t just begin and end with allowing employees to work from home for a couple of days a week though.
An on-site server for a fixed number of Proclaim users creates problems when your firm expands. Once your employee headcount exceeds the number of users the server has been built for, the server becomes redundant.
The Cloud, on the other hand, is fully elastic. It expands and retracts with your firm with no inconvenience to your infrastructure.
It’s also an operational expense as opposed to a capital expense. Transferring money between the two budgets is a practice that is going to get more and more common as ways of working continues to evolve.
The call for hybrid working from employees in legal services isn’t going away anytime soon – but it’s not a call that needs to be ignored or batted away, because there’s a solution that’s ready and waiting to be implemented.
