Clarkson Wright & Jakes is a Kent-based law practice that has been delivering a range of legal services since the business was founded in 1875. Fast forward 145 years and the 75-employee firm was looking for a new IT provider to take it to the next level.
Dissatisfied with its legacy IT partner, and held back by an ageing practice management system (PMS), the firm turned to Oosha in search of a forward-thinking alternative.
This case study highlights how partnering with Oosha helped Clarkson Wright & Jakes build a high-performing, flexible, and secure IT platform in the cloud, migrate to a new PMS, and stay fully operational throughout the challenges posed by Covid-19.
The challenge
Before joining Oosha over two years ago, CWJ was experiencing several fundamental challenges with its IT infrastructure and providers. Its existing on-premise solution didn’t provide the platform it needed to develop a modern IT function – it made remote working more challenging and restricted CWJ’s ability to migrate from its PMS, Envision.
As Envision was nearing end-of-life, the level of support available was gradually decreasing, potentially leaving CWJ vulnerable to emerging security threats that could target the valuable and sensitive information its users deal with day to day.
Most fundamental to the challenges CWJ was experiencing, was its IT support provider. Although based locally, CWJ’s experience with its legacy partner was far from close-working. The non-specialist provider was a poor cultural fit with CWJ, leading to hesitance from members of staff to contact the helpdesk – overwhelming internal IT resources as a result. The team at CWJ also found it difficult to escalate issues to senior people when they needed to as it was dealing with a large-scale support company – often leaving them feeling frustrated when key decisions needed to be made quickly.
The solution
After a lengthy tender process, CWJ joined forces with Oosha in January 2019. The first task was to rebuild its IT infrastructure from scratch, providing them with a more secure, high-performing, and cloud-based foundation on which to host SOS, its new practice management system.
Oosha’s technical team worked on-site through the two-week implementation stage to iron out any issues and ensure the cloud platform was seamlessly launched. And then, one year later, helped them implement the new practice management system that was so critical to its operations.
After the initial launch, the team at CWJ was able to access Oosha’s specialist legal IT support desk – which has extensive experience dealing with all major legal applications. This was critical to CWJ, particularly after the launch of SOS.
The benefits
The move to the cloud with Oosha has given CWJ a solid platform on which to operate effectively, and especially so through the challenges posed by Covid-19.
CWJ was able to adopt remote working with ease and leverage Oosha’s expertise to bring in multi-factor authentication for users so that sensitive legal documents can’t be accessed by malicious actors. This has come in conjunction with cyber awareness training, where the Oosha team is helping bring CWJ’s workforce up to speed on how to work safely from home.
Speaking about the partnership, and Oosha’s support at the outbreak of the pandemic, Andrew Wright, senior partner at CWJ said:
“Not that many of our users were set up for remote working, and Oosha helped us source some laptops very quickly. We had a senior member of the Oosha team dedicated to CWJ, and having that single point of contact at the start of the pandemic was really helpful. We now have everyone who needs to work from home doing so, and it’s worked out very well.”
The success of the partnership has also delivered benefits that are more than just technological. Highlighting Oosha’s agile, friendly, and personable approach, Andrew adds: “The key reason we chose Oosha was the cultural fit. With Oosha, we felt like we could just pick up the phone and any issues would get sorted. If we ever needed to, we also felt we could escalate issues right to the top of the business.
“Our people will always phone Oosha as the first port of call, rather than thinking of an in-house solution – because of the warm fuzzy feeling our staff receive when dealing with Oosha.
“Oosha’s agile approach and quick-footed nature also helps us make rapid decisions when we need to.”
In the next stage of CWJ’s partnership with Oosha, its phone system and collaboration tools will be reviewed – with the potential of using Microsoft Teams to deliver an all-in-one, cloud-based telephony and collaboration solution.
Get a more in-depth perspective on Oosha’s solutions for the legal sector, and on the foundations for CWJ’s success in moving to the cloud, in this 15-minute podcast.
