Agile law firms are the future

Nick Hayne, head of professional services at Quiss, on the accelerated digital journey of law firms and what challenges lie ahead.

Considering the long-term impact of Covid-19, news that Deloitte is preparing to close four UK offices and offer full-time remote working to 500 employees surely points to a different future for knowledge-based businesses.

Law firms must consider becoming more agile, particularly now that remote working is likely to form part of the future working environment. Fortunately, many had already started to embrace digital transformation ahead of the current challenging circumstances.

This digital transformation journey is typically focused on the deployment of technologies and solutions that deliver the greatest flexibility for dispersed workforces, with secondary goals that include improvements to the user experience and data security.

Many smaller law firms recognise agile working can deliver a host of benefits, from greater employee productivity and increased motivation, to a reduction in office-related costs, as seen with Deloitte. But what challenges remain?

Connected

Agile working requires a wider change in overall IT strategy, exploiting services such as unified communication tools, team collaboration platforms and VPN technology that enable employees to work safely from anywhere.

Connectivity will be a key factor for firms trying to meet the demands of an increasingly mobile workforce, which need encrypted and reliable connections that allow them to reach the organisation’s applications and services quickly and easily.

Secure

Security remains the top priority for law firms developing a remote working strategy and requires traffic on unknown or insecure networks to be encrypted, to avoid ‘man-in-the-middle’ attacks and prevent accidental data loss.

An agile workforce also needs to be monitored more closely, as activity that includes visiting risky URLs and downloading unofficial apps will increase the risk of ransomware attacks.

Compliant

The legal sector knows the cost of compliance failure, with the potential for punitive fines and the fewer tangible costs associated with a damaged reputation – ensuring no firm wants a raft of issues resulting from a remote working policy.

The challenge is providing employees easy access to internal systems and applications from anywhere, on any network – they need to connect, communicate and collaborate, while maintaining exceptional security standards.

Engaged

Remote working must work without a negative impact on the employee experience to ensure there are no complaints about annoying re-authentication issues or poor-quality video calls, which can all be avoided with the right solutions.

Agile working can be a win-win scenario for law firms and their people – who typically enjoy the relative freedom of working from home, which often translates into increased productivity.

We now have the right integrated technologies to help law firms with their ongoing digital transformation journey, with connected cloud critical to introducing greater flexibility, resilience and security. So please get in touch and start a conversation with Quiss.