How a Clearwater Law Firm Cut IT Downtime by 90%
Hartley & Voss is a 12-attorney litigation firm in Clearwater. Like a lot of firms its size, it grew faster than its technology: a seven-year-old server in a closet, a document management system that froze under load, and an hourly IT vendor who showed up after things broke. By the firm's own estimate, staff were losing six billable hours a week to technology problems.
The breaking point#
It came on a filing deadline. The document management system crashed at 3 PM with a brief due to the court by 5. The team recovered, barely, by emailing drafts around and reconstructing exhibits from local copies. The next morning, the managing partner started looking for a different way to run technology.
We weren't practicing law anymore. We were rebooting things and praying. - Managing Partner, Hartley & Voss
What we did#
Week 1: full audit. Every device, every credential, every aging component documented, with a risk ranking the partners could actually read.
Weeks 2 to 4: stop the bleeding. Emergency patching, MFA on email and remote access, and managed backups with a tested restore.
Month 2: retire the closet. The document management system moved to its vendor's cloud edition; files moved to SharePoint with matter-based permissions.
Month 3: steady state. comTECH Shield Pro monitoring, a 15-minute helpdesk response target, and a quarterly technology roadmap tied to the firm's budget cycle.
The results, twelve months on#
Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
Unplanned downtime | About 4.5 hours / month | Under 25 minutes / month |
Helpdesk first response | Same day, sometimes | 12 minutes on average |
Support tickets per month | 38 | 11 |
Staff tech frustration (internal survey) | 2.1 / 5 | 4.6 / 5 |
In their words#
The honest review is that I haven't thought about our IT in months. For a managing partner, that's the highest compliment there is.
Law firms have a particular mix of deadline pressure, confidentiality requirements, and zero tolerance for downtime. If that sounds like your firm, we should talk.
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