IndustriesProfessional services
Client files you cannot lose, deadlines you cannot miss, and a confidentiality obligation on every one of them.
Law, accounting and engineering firms sell judgement and time. The IT has to keep client information confidential, keep the practice systems up through a filing deadline, and keep records for as long as the regulator and the insurer say.
What breaks
What breaks in a firm that bills by the hour.
The busy season is the wrong time for anything to be slow
Tax season, a court filing deadline, a bid due at noon. A practice server that hangs for twenty minutes is twenty minutes of every fee earner's day, at the point in the year when there is no slack to absorb it.
Confidentiality fails in small ways
An email to the wrong client, a shared mailbox everyone can read, an associate who left in March and can still open the document management system in June. None of it is dramatic. All of it is reportable.
Files must be kept for years and found in minutes
Retention rules mean nothing can be quietly deleted, and a regulator or a court can ask for a file long after the engagement closed. The archive has to be as searchable as the live matter.
Documents live in five places
The document management system, email attachments, the desktop, a personal OneDrive and the scanner's folder. The version that went to the client is somewhere in there.
The cyber insurance renewal asks questions nobody can answer
Is MFA enforced everywhere? Are backups immutable? When was the last restore test? The premium depends on the answers, and so does the cover.
The software you run
We look after what it runs on.
Practice management, document management and the discipline-specific tools your fee earners live in. We keep the servers, workstations and accounts they run on working, and we know which vendor to call.
The vendor supports the application. We manage the machines, accounts, network and backups it depends on, and we make the call to the vendor so you do not have to.
- Legal practice
- Clio, PCLaw and CosmoLex for practice management; iManage, NetDocuments and Worldox for documents
- Accounting practice
- CaseWare, TaxCycle and ProFile for the work; QuickBooks Online and Sage for the books; secure client portals for document exchange
- Engineering practice
- AutoCAD, Civil 3D, Revit and Bluebeam, with licence servers and workstations sized for them
- Every firm
- Microsoft 365 with retention policies, Adobe Acrobat, DocuSign, and the phone system
- Remote work
- Associates working from home on firm-managed laptops, with MFA and conditional access rather than an open VPN
Software commonly used in Professional services.
A scenario, not a case study
The last week of April at a twelve-person accounting firm.
Suppose a Calgary accounting practice with two partners, seven accountants and three admin staff, four days from the personal tax deadline.
This is an illustration of how the service works in a business like yours. It does not describe a client.
- Monday 7:40am
The TaxCycle server has been slow since the weekend. Monitoring flagged the disk filling at 2am; our engineer clears the space and schedules a replacement drive for after the deadline. Nobody in the office notices.
- Monday 11:05am
An email arrives from a 'client' with a PDF of 'missing slips'. Proofpoint quarantines it before it reaches the inbox. The senior accountant it targeted gets a note explaining what it was, not a lecture.
- Wednesday
A junior accountant hands in notice, effective Friday. The help desk schedules offboarding for 5pm Friday: practice system, document management, email and MFA device, all in the same hour, with a report to the partners.
- Friday 5:02pm
The offboarding runs. Their email is converted to a shared mailbox the partner can read, their files stay in the firm's document system where they always were, and nothing walks out.
- May
The cyber insurance renewal arrives. The answers come from the monthly report and the restore-test log rather than from memory: MFA enforced, backups immutable, last restore test dated.
- Year end
The retention policy in Microsoft 365 holds closed matters for the period the firm sets, searchable, and un-deletable by accident.
What we would put in place
What we would put in place for a firm.
Email security, access control and tested backups do most of the work. The rest is knowing your practice software and scheduling around your calendar.
Cybersecurity
Email filtering for the invoice and slip scams that target firms, MFA everywhere, staff training, and the evidence for questionnaires and insurers.
Read about cybersecurityBackup & recovery
Client files and practice databases backed up continuously with an immutable copy, restore-tested monthly, retained for as long as you set.
Read about backup & recoveryCloud & Microsoft 365
One document structure, retention policies that match your obligations, and conditional access for associates working from home.
Read about cloud & microsoft 365IT support
Same-hour offboarding when someone leaves, and maintenance scheduled around your busy season rather than through it.
Read about it supportDocument & data AI
Contracts and agreements summarised with the key clauses and dates flagged, for a person to decide on.
Read about document & data aiBusiness process automation
Client intake and engagement letters generated and routed without re-typing.
Read about business process automation
The package we usually recommend
Professional
- per user, per month
- from $125–155
Threat hunting, full MFA and dark web monitoring in Professional cover the confidentiality obligations most firms carry. Firms that face regulator audits or client security reviews usually move to Enterprise for compliance reporting and vulnerability scanning.
Final pricing depends on environment complexity, compliance requirements and support scope, and is confirmed after the IT audit.
Fair questions
What professional services businesses ask us.
- Our practice software vendor handles our IT.
- They support their application. Someone still has to run the server it sits on, the laptops that connect to it, the email around it and the backups of it. That is us, and we make the call to the vendor when it is their problem.
- Will you sign a confidentiality agreement?
- Yes. We sign the confidentiality terms your obligations require, our staff are bound by them, and every engagement is covered by $5M of professional liability insurance.
- We are busiest exactly when you would want to onboard us.
- Then we onboard you after the deadline. The audit can happen any time; the deployment is scheduled for the quiet weeks, and the handover from your old provider is ours to manage.
- Half our associates work from home.
- That is normal now. Firm-managed laptops, MFA and conditional access mean a login from an unknown device or country fails, and the document system is reached the same way from the office or the kitchen table.
Book a free IT audit.
No obligation and no pitch deck. We look at what you have, tell you what is wrong with it, and you decide what to do with that.
- A full inventory of your devices, accounts and licences
- A written list of the security gaps we find
- What your current setup is costing you against a flat per-user rate
Prefer to talk? Get in touch