Question for those who worked for Lawfirms
Posted by spoohne@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 26 comments
Over the last three years I’ve been working to support a small law firm— managing their m365 tenant and basic IT needs in office. It’s been pretty manageable early on, as a small side gig, but these guys have grown in number of employees pretty quickly in this time, and it’s starting to become more than enough to manage during lunch breaks from my primary gig.
My question to those that have worked in a law firm before, is what exactly did the totality of work look like— for a bit of background they’re about 15 employees in total. M365. No on prem servers. Everything is cloud based.
Rowmaster-OwO@reddit
Good thing I found this during my like, semi quarterly lurk lol.
I worked as a sort sysadmin/help desk at a law firm and the biggest thing we spent time on other than like break/fix was DMS (Document management system)/Permissions for groups.
If your law firm implements any form of document management, like imanage, you will be spending a lot of time setting it up and configuring, and potentially dealing with permissions on it. I know for imanage it works like:
Client > Matter > Folder > Subfolder and matters act as the root folder. This will change if you use something else.
Additionally it will depend on how you want to do perms. we had it so there was a drive full of folders. The root folder had a handful of folders based on source/location and within those folders, we had subfolders that needed someone to manually add them to a group. aka
Root (Read)
Source (Special)
Matter (group with Full control)
spoohne@reddit (OP)
Going live with filevine soon. Ready for that headache 🤣
CeC-P@reddit
At the new MSP I work for, a company that size might put in 1 ticket a month. It depends on hires and fires and knowledge of the people there plus how often the worst employees install malicious software while looking for a free PDF editor. But it'd be very low in general.
spoohne@reddit (OP)
I would say they’re averaging about 6-7 incidents a week currently. What else does the msp offer besides basic ticket resolution? Who’s managing the desktops? Network? M365 tenant needs?
CeC-P@reddit
We charge for "project" work and for anything involving malware unless they're on the top 2 tier plans. So server replacements are extra, otherwise anything anyone wants to call in with, no matter how stupid. We don't nickel and dime and have limited blocks of hours per year with minimum 1 hour for a 3 minute call like some of the bigger dishonest ones.
spoohne@reddit (OP)
Is it safe to say msp service would run them about 100/200$ per user they’re supporting?
CeC-P@reddit
We do per endpoint, including printers and some specific desktops like something running a perpetual slideshow on a TV. I'm actually not sure what our pricing is. I didn't talk to Sales about it.
GlobalAd7103@reddit
More than that depending on servers and infrastructure
spoohne@reddit (OP)
Assuming no on prem infra everything is saas. Using filecloud for file share and onedrive share point for all else. Typical case management software for their legal workflows.
DiligentPhotographer@reddit
I would charge someone even more for all SaaS. Securely wrangling that shit is a nightmare for smaller orgs who often are on plans that have sso or other security paywalled off.
Background-Tear-1046@reddit
pdfox.cloud is free and browser based, good for law firms
gafftapes20@reddit
I work for a legal consulting firm that’s primarily lawyer based. I started as a developer that did about 5 hours or so of system admin work per week. It’s fully remote at about 15 people it was part time maybe 20-30 hours per week. By 30 it was full time, now at about 70 it’s grown to a 4 person team.
We are very tech heavy as a law firm and capacity. We have 1.5 fte essentially in the help desk and all other of our free time is project based. This includes myself that is mostly a developer that did system admin work in the side. We have a lot of fancy security and remote management tools that are typical for larger companies, but because of our requirements have implemented.
It’s very dependent in my opinion of the specific nature of the company and their specific needs and security posture.
OneSeaworthiness7768@reddit
I work for a law firm. I’m just one person in one team of a large IT department. Not gonna lie the idea that a law firm doesn’t retain any kind of full time IT presence at all whether in house or MSP sounds wild to me.
spoohne@reddit (OP)
It’s wild out here
dpf81nz@reddit
I used to be Sole IT Manager at a 100 user firm and so that role also included user support. Had busy days and quiet days, but i also had an MSP doing some of the work (Security, Patching etc). Cant imagine it being very busy at all for 15 users though
Squeezer999@reddit
I've done some work for law firms of similar size. Like others have said it really comes down to how tech savvy the attorneys are and also what e Discovery software they are using. Most of the e Discovery software for offices of that size and affordability are pieces of junk.
WorkFoundMyOldAcct@reddit
Yours is far smaller than the couple I’ve worked at. I’ve always joined more established firms of 300+ users; I’ve migrated systems to O365, stood up cloud tenants, spun up on-premises infrastructure, and also provided white-glove tier 1 helpdesk support.
One thing is true across all firms: you need to balance what the firm thinks they need and what you KNOW they need. They’re not IT people, and as lawyers, they’re smart enough to trust people that can speak intelligently.
spoohne@reddit (OP)
Yeah, I can speak to them pretty candidly. They’re family of a close friend of mine— that’s how I wound up supporting them. Just have no idea what the typical growing stages are for a law firm. At 15 users, it seems having an inhouse IT support hire is not the common path. Everyone says MSP makes most sense. I know they’re gonna hate the idea of not having a go to white glove support guy—so I’m just trying to brace myself for the part of the conversation where they ask me what MY number would be to support them full time and leave my current gig.
WorkFoundMyOldAcct@reddit
My two cents: no matter what you do, growth is just hard. I’ve seen it happen in two ways.
Option 1: the firm hires an MSP until the firm hits X users (some as low as 50; some as high as 100), and then bring IT in-house to maintain.
Option 2: have one white glove IT person for year support and simple/general systems administration, and only outsource major projects to MSPs or project consultants.
Option 2 is more scalable for firms if their goal is to grow and grow and grow. I’ve pitched it to partners as “an investment that will pay itself off 3-fold when you hit 100 users, and 10-fold when you hit 200 users” And let the numbers speak for themselves.
old_cypherpunk@reddit
Depends on how old and/tech savvy they are. I never hear from some of the attorneys. Some I have to explain what the start menu is or babysit on an almost daily basis. Especially if something changes. Attorneys don't deal well with change. Explaining thing ahead of time time in a group email doesn't help, you'll have to explain it to each person as they encounter the change individually.
It for about 50 attorneys and staff. Some days I get a lot of internal work done. Some days I'm being pulled left and right throughout the day.
spoohne@reddit (OP)
So you think 50 employees in the number where in house IT hire makes sense?
disclosure5@reddit
50 employees are much better served by an MSP. For one, hiring one in house person means that person can't go on leave and actually turn off. Two people.. will be called excessive.
old_cypherpunk@reddit
I'd say its at the edge of being worth it. It helps we have a sofware development team attached to us like a cancerous growth. Otherwise I'd probably be part time or doing a lot more paralegal/staff type work like I used to do.
spoohne@reddit (OP)
And assuming you were hiring for a role that supported that 50 user base, what would you expect the salary to be for that person?
old_cypherpunk@reddit
Kinda depends where you are. In a midwest city of 200k like me, maybe $50-60k? I've been here a long time so I haven't looked at the market lately.
OkAssistance7072@reddit
I was at am MSP and my clients were almost exclusively law firms. Single person firms up to 300 users. Private firms, criminal law, public defense, business law, duii firms, etc etc and everything in between.
Some I didn't hear from for months and others I had to be on site or holding hands almost every day. I had a bunch that were 10-15 user firms which were always needing something. All on M365, some on prem for client data, case matter software, VMs etc. Turnover is usually high as clerks and students come and go so lots of account on/offboarding. We got a bunch to migrate from on prem, so that project is always fun. Lots of network buildouts or overhauls. Some new office builds from scratch. LOTS of workstation setups. We handled inventory for almost all of them and had Dell/Microsoft/HP/etc reps depending on their HW of choice. Setup and configure servers, firewalls, switching, cloud, etc. Just depends on the business needs.