How TELUS Business helped MacLean Law streamline their IT spend and increase billable time
Customer stories · Jul 9, 2024
Family law with excellence and personalized solutions
MacLean Law is an award-winning* family law firm located in Vancouver, BC. They provide relationship exit strategies to help individuals with significant assets achieve the best outcome during a divorce, from maximizing financial rewards to winning child custody battles. The firm stands out for its comprehensive approach to resolving family legal issues and its experience with international cases and handling jurisdictional complexities. With a commitment to excellence and a deep understanding of family law, MacLean Law provides personalized solutions to each client's unique situation.
The firm has numerous international jurisdictional law wins and experience with complex tax disputes. The team of lawyers and partners brings sage senior counsel experience on major and complex family law, and divorce files.
*MacLean Law was rated Vancouver's top family law firm by independent agency Top Choice Awards. They also received the 2024 Leap legal software award for ‘Family Law Firm of the Year’.
The challenge
Prior to finding a managed IT partner, MacLean Law had a three-person internal IT team. However, their primary legal application was unreliable, causing significant productivity hurdles and frustration for employees. The team couldn’t access their data promptly or enter their billable time into the accounting system as timely as needed.
Their internal IT team didn’t have the expertise or resources to resolve the issues with their existing application and the firm was incurring high overhead costs, receiving low-quality support and dealing with increased frustration.
Lorne MacLean, KC, the firm’s owner, and the CFO, Ryan Torvik, decided to find legal IT specialists to conduct an independent audit of the firm, to help them identify gaps in their existing IT infrastructure. TELUS' audit mapped out areas that could help enhance productivity, mitigate risks and ensure that the technology stack was aligned with the firm's legal practice needs.
The solution
After completing the comprehensive IT audit, TELUS Business’ team of specialists built a roadmap to determine the best solutions for their IT needs and what the firm needed to prioritize to improve their operations. This roadmap included:
- Legal applications: We conducted an in-depth analysis of all legal applications used by the firm to evaluate their effectiveness in supporting their operations. This review included assessing the functionality, user experience and compatibility of the applications with the firm's specific needs.
- Cybersecurity: A full security assessment was carried out to identify and address potential vulnerabilities that could pose a threat to MacLean Law's sensitive data and client information. The analysis involved evaluating the firm's security protocols, conducting penetration testing and implementing robust security measures to help safeguard against cyber threats.
- Network reliability: The next step was to assess the firm's network infrastructure to ensure optimal performance and reliability. This involved conducting an evaluation of the network architecture, identifying potential bottlenecks or points of failure and helped learn what measures were to help enhance the network's stability and uptime.
The results
After reviewing the results of the audit and roadmap proposed by the TELUS team, MacLean Law approved a project to start implementing the proposed improvements. TELUS Business, operating at the time as BMC Networks, also took over their day-to-day IT operations and vendor management, assigning a dedicated IT support technician to work out of their Vancouver office on most days. This helped reduce friction and ensure more agile support for their staff.
Our team of IT specialists revamped the firm’s primary application infrastructure according to the vendor’s specifications and long-standing issues with their primary business software application were resolved, enabling their users to be more productive and achieve greater reliability and application uptime.
Outsourcing their IT support also helped the firm decrease their overall IT costs, while improving their users’ help desk experience. As MacLean Law continues to adopt new legal and cloud-based technologies and grow their legal practice, TELUS Business will be there to guide them with a long-term IT roadmap, revised periodically, and continually advising on cybersecurity measures to help protect their confidential client information.
Why partner with a legal IT specialist
The consequences of downtime are significant for law firms, due to the time-sensitive nature of legal practice and the importance of prioritizing activities that can lead to billable time. Lawyers need to be able to communicate with their clients via email at any time and be able to access their data around the clock. If IT isn’t working properly, lawyers could miss a court deadline and adversely affect their client’s case.
With that in mind, choosing a
reliable partner
that understands the firm’s pain points was imperative. The number one reason MacLean Law chose TELUS Business was our extensive experience with law firms and their applications.
We provide managed IT services in Victoria, Vancouver and across Canada, helping ensure your business is supported locally. Our Virtual CIO team develops business-aligned IT strategies to drive impact and help you get a higher return on investment. We handle your IT for you so you can get back to doing what you do best.
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