Supporting legal IT innovation

For one of the UK’s leading law firms, specialising in corporate, real estate and private client work.

A programme for change and the need for service.

Coinciding with the arrival of new CIO this Top 100 UK law firm undertook a review of its IT provision. As part of this, the service desk was put under the spotlight.

The firm had previously made the decision to outsource its service desk. The CIO explained the context of this move – from an in-house to an outsourced service desk solution.

”One of the challenges we constantly faced was retaining staff. Being headquartered close to London is both an opportunity and a threat. Often, as soon as we trained up a new member of the service desk, they would look to further their career by moving to London. We found ourselves in a cycle of recruiting and training, and suffering the distraction of it.”

The initial service provider was not a specialist in end-user support but provided it as an extension to its cloud solution. As the firm continued to grow in size, both organically and through mergers, the lawyers’ reliance and demands on IT increased. The law firm’s IT team were becoming increasingly aware that the lack of 1st line customer service, poor response levels and need for continuous service improvement were damaging the reputation of IT within the firm, as well as negatively impacting the lawyers’ productivity. Ultimately, they needed a specialist partner for end-user support.

In order to address these challenges, the firm invited Acora into the RFP process and ultimately chose Acora because of its specialist legal focus and experience in delivering end-user support.

Responsive end-user services

Over a tightly managed 8-week programme, Acora transitioned the firm’s service desk to operate from its high performance, ISO27001 certified UK-based centre. The contracted service is available from 7 am to 7.30 pm, 5 days a week, but as Acora’s service desk centre operates 24/7, 365 days a year, there is always a point of contact out-of-hours if needed. From day one, the firm saw a massive increase in response levels from Acora.

Acora worked with the law firm’s IT team to set SLAs for metrics such as abandoned calls and since the start of the engagement, and the firm reported that Acora had met or exceeded these targets without fail. The delivery of the service includes monthly face-to-face reviews to run through SLA reports, dashboards and continuous service improvement initiatives.

An agile model ideal for supporting business change

Shortly after Acora took on the delivery of the law firm’s service performance, continuous improvement, collaboration & availability desk, the firm announced a merger with another top flight firm and subsequently the company’s staff numbers increased significantly. Acora was able to effectively and flexibly adapt its SLAs to incorporate the additional end users. As a result, the firm decided to widen the scope for Acora to also include 2nd line support across its four offices and transfer the 2nd line support team to Acora for a more seamless, well-managed end-user support function.

A mature IT service ready to support innovation

The increase in first-time fix and service desk resolution rates clearly reflects the successful work from Acora, but also highlights the improved health of the wider IT ecosystem. The CIO commented on the cross-supplier collaboration.

“We now have 3 key support providers; one for our cloud platform, one for software and Acora for end user support. While we knew that managing three different IT support partners would come with some challenges, we are extremely satisfied with the way Acora is proactively managing relationships and effectively liaising with our other providers on issues such as Problem and Change. The law firm has now launched a new client management system that will act as a springboard to automation, workflows and client service innovations. In order for this to be a success, we have to be joined up and we feel we definitely have achieved the ecosystem to support that.”

From day one of the service, the firm saw a massive increase in response levels from Acora.

Service Manager, Top 100 UK Law Firm