Case Study: Legal Services – Hunters Law LLP
Extech Cloud helped create a modern workplace for law firm, Hunters Law LLP.
Hunters Law LLP is a leading law firm in Central London that has provided a wide range of services since 1715.
The multi-disciplinary practice works collaboratively to provide a comprehensive service across all of its practice areas for property, business, charity, family and private clients.
“We embarked on a complete review of our IT infrastructure with the focus on a modern workplace where our staff could work from anywhere. We chose Extech Cloud as they were able to demonstrate they could pull all of our technologies together properly to make us more efficient, while saving us significant capital expenditure and licensing costs.”
Alex Roberts, IT Manager, Petroplan
Background
Extech Cloud started working with Hunters Law LLP at the start of 2020. With more than 100 staff, the company needed to upgrade its infrastructure and its servers, which were more than five years old. The firm’s Citrix virtualisation software licence fee renewal was also approaching which was a main driver for change.
Hunters were also previously told by their software owners/providers that it was not possible to put their old apps on the cloud. Their previous IT partner was therefore pushing them towards a “hybrid environment” where they were to be locked-in to a Data Centre.
Hunters didn’t want to be tied down to one supplier and thought they had no way out. Until now.
Journey to the cloud
When Hunters Law LLP first approached Extech Cloud, they were looking for a new strategic IT direction. They wanted an IT system and infrastructure that was designed for them, and worked exactly how they wanted it to.
With lots of applications, their whole system was increasingly slow and they didn’t want to spend significant money on upgrades and licences for marginal improvements. Many of their PCs and laptops were also on Windows 7 which reached the end of its life in early 2020.
Extech Cloud audited the whole IT infrastructure and assets, set an IT strategy and began modernising everything including more than 100 user PCs and laptops. Extech Cloud deployed Windows Autopilot, making it easy for everyone to receive their new machines and get working straight away.
The full transition to the cloud was staged in tandem with their Citrix virtualisation software. At first, some of their older applications were
not fully integrated into the cloud, but were accessed as before.
Hunters Law LLP now takes full advantage of the benefits offered by Microsoft 365 and Azure, with the very latest security and exceptional performance levels.
Four pieces of legacy software now run on the cloud thanks to Extech Cloud’s pioneering implementation of Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD).
Practice and case management system Tikit Partner 4 Windows (Tikit P4W), CCH Central, CCH Trust Accounts and BigHand are now published as apps, as opposed to full remote desktop sessions.
Now, when using the old software, each user experiences faster speeds. Previously it took about 40 seconds to open the CCH software in the office for example, and now they load in less than 5 seconds from staff members’ home. Application updates also don’t need to be conducted on every single workstation and staff have access to systems even in a web browser and tablet.
Day-to-day support
Today, Extech Cloud provides service desk support and operational management of the cloud infrastructure, 100+ users and endpoints, along with advice and guidance on emerging products, features and security compliance and procedure information. Hunters Law LLP only pay for the IT services they actually need on a month by month basis.
Working from home and the future
In March 2020, it was crucial that the team at Hunters Law LLP had the ability to leverage cloud services to maintain day-to-day business operations while working remotely and to maintain regular contact with clients. All members of the team are now operating productively, from anywhere.
“We have been undergoing a complex IT transition to move all our systems and applications from running on our legacy Citrix platform to Microsoft’s Cloud services.”
“ It has been a complex project, firstly in modernising our workplace technology, coordinating and managing a number of application vendors in order to migrate and update all of these systems and then re-engineering them to work out of Microsoft’s Private cloud services. Some of the techniques used to achieve this are cutting edge which has made the transition largely seamless to us all in the past few months.
It is important to also bear in mind the considerable challenges of performing such a transition during lockdown where all interaction between vendors, team members and staff has been remote and visits to site have not been possible.
We were indeed most fortunate that the roll out of workplace devices was completed in March just prior to lockdown in which we were able to take advantage of new applications such as Microsoft Teams to improve communication with staff working from home. Without these changes the impact on our ability to work and on the firm would have been very significant.”
Arif Kamal, Chief Finance & Operations Officer, Hunters Law LLP
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