IT support for solicitors and law firms has to be built around the specific realities of a legal practice, not adapted from a generic SME template after the first problem occurs.
A solicitor’s firm runs on trust, time, and continuity. Clients trust the firm with their money, their most sensitive information, and matters that directly affect their lives. Fee earners bill by the hour, so every minute lost to IT problems is revenue gone. And continuity of access (to case management, to legal accounts, to email and documents) is what holds everything together when multiple matters are running simultaneously, and deadlines do not move.
Not every IT provider understands how a legal practice operates, what the SRA expects, or why the distinction between a cloud-hosted case management system and a properly backed-up one matters.
At Computercentric, we have been supporting professional services businesses across the West Midlands for more than 20 years, and that experience shapes everything about how we approach a law firm or solicitors practice.
Talk to us about IT support for your firm.
Managed IT services for law firms: what we include
Properly structured IT support for a legal practice covers considerably more ground than a helpdesk number. Here is what a complete service for a solicitor’s firm should look like, and what we provide:
- Day-to-day helpdesk support for fee earners, partners, and support staff
- Case management system support – LEAP, Proclaim, Clio, Osprey, Actionstep and others
- Microsoft 365 administration, security configuration, and ongoing management
- Cybersecurity: MFA, email authentication, endpoint protection, phishing filtering, and security monitoring
- Patch management delivered within SRA and Cyber Essentials compliance timelines
- Backup monitoring, immutable cloud backup, and disaster recovery planning
- Secure remote and hybrid working setup for fee earners across multiple locations
- DMARC, SPF, and DKIM configuration to protect against email fraud and conveyancing scams
- Cyber Essentials certification support – mandatory for firms with Criminal Legal Aid contracts
- Staff cybersecurity awareness training and simulated phishing exercises
- Hardware supply, device lifecycle management, and connectivity support
- Microsoft 365 backup covering email, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams
- IT consultancy for cloud migration, office moves, and technology planning
The objective is a setup that reliably supports billable work, meets regulatory expectations, and does not require your practice manager to triage technical problems on behalf of their team.
SRA & Cyber Essentials readiness checker
Toggle the controls your firm currently has in place. Your compliance score updates in real time against SRA expectations and Cyber Essentials v3.3 (April 2026).
Why solicitors need a specialist IT provider, not just any IT company
The legal sector sits in a specific position where IT failure has consequences that go well beyond the operational. It carries regulatory risk, direct financial exposure for the firm, and, in the worst cases, liability to clients.
The SRA’s cybersecurity expectations have moved considerably in the past few years. In 2025, the authority received over 2,300 reported cyber incidents from UK solicitor practices and intervened in 47 firms that year, with IT security failures cited as a primary factor.
Many of those were practices of exactly the size Computercentric serves – not large commercial firms with complex systems, but solicitors offices where cybersecurity had simply not kept pace with the threat environment.
Client money obligations create a technical dimension that most IT providers have never had to think about.
The SRA Accounts Rules require that client funds are kept separate, accurately recorded, and immediately reconcilable. If ransomware or a data loss event corrupts your legal accounts database, demonstrating client account accuracy becomes a regulatory matter, not just an IT recovery task. That obligation needs to be reflected in how your disaster recovery procedures are designed and tested, and a provider without legal sector experience will not know how to build it in.
There is also the productivity dimension.
65% of UK law firms reported a cyber incident in the most recent reporting period, with attacks on legal practices up 77% in 2024. Downtime cost estimates for a small to mid-sized firm run at £3,000 to £5,000 per hour.
A provider who does not understand the billable-time revenue model will not prioritise the right systems in a recovery scenario.
Case management support for solicitors: LEAP, Clio, Proclaim and more
The software that runs a legal practice is not interchangeable with standard business applications. It has specific infrastructure requirements, integrates tightly with Microsoft 365, and fails in ways that only become recognisable with real experience of the platforms.
LEAP
LEAP is the dominant cloud-based practice management system for small and mid-sized UK firms. It combines matter management, time recording, legal accounting, and document automation in one platform – but it requires Microsoft 365 Business Standard (64-bit) with Exchange Online and desktop Office apps, and it explicitly does not support terminal servers, Citrix, or shared OS virtualisation.
That last point catches out firms that move to virtual desktop environments without checking LEAP’s requirements first.
Stable, symmetric broadband is also essential; LEAP’s minimum connectivity threshold scales with the number of concurrent users, and an office on a shared consumer broadband line will experience problems that are easy to misattribute.
Proclaim (Access Legal)
Proclaim runs in conveyancing, personal injury, and family law practices across the UK. In many firms, it is still deployed as an on-premise or hosted application with a SQL database, which puts server management, transaction-log backups, RDS session stability, and patch discipline squarely in the IT provider’s domain.
Untested database backups and degraded VPN performance are the two most common causes of Proclaim outages, both preventable, neither immediately obvious without prior experience of the platform.
Clio
Clio is the Law Society-endorsed choice for many modern legal practices and has a strong integration ecosystem with Microsoft 365. Because it is pure cloud SaaS, the IT focus shifts to connectivity reliability, correct Exchange and calendar synchronisation, MFA enforcement, and clean permission management for staff who join, leave, or work part-time across matters.
The integration between Clio and Microsoft 365 is its main strength, but it also means that a poorly configured Microsoft 365 tenant will create Clio problems that look like Clio bugs.
Osprey Approach and Actionstep
Osprey serves UK firms from around 10 to 50 fee earners through a private-cloud model hosted in UK data centres, with strong multi-office support.
Actionstep is growing in the UK mid-market with configurable workflows.
For both platforms, periodic exports of client account data and financial records to firm-controlled storage are part of a proper continuity plan – because a vendor outage that prevents access to client ledgers is a regulatory problem for the firm, regardless of whose infrastructure caused it.
We support the IT environments all these platforms run within. That means endpoints, connectivity, Microsoft 365, user access management, backup, and direct vendor liaison when an issue sits inside the application itself – so your team is not stuck managing two separate support conversations at the same time.
If you are still evaluating providers, our guide to choosing the right IT support partner for your business covers the questions worth asking before you sign anything.
Case management IT requirements at a glance
Select your practice management platform to see the exact IT requirements, common failure points, and what we handle on your behalf.
Cybersecurity for law firms and solicitors: the controls that matter
Law firms sit at a specific intersection that makes them a high-value target: they hold client money and sensitive personal data, they operate under deadline pressure, and they rely heavily on email for instructions that trigger financial transfers.
Getting the controls right is not a compliance checkbox – it is the difference between a firm that has experienced a conveyancing fraud and one that hasn’t.
Conveyancing fraud and business email compromise
Between April 2024 and March 2025, Action Fraud received 143 reports of conveyancing payment diversion fraud in England and Wales, with total losses of approximately £11.7 million.
Residential cases averaged between £78,000 and £82,000 in losses per incident. The SRA’s own analysis found that 78% of all cyber losses it handled occurred in conveyancing matters – and the majority were not caused by sophisticated attacks … they were enabled by missing or misconfigured IT controls.
The most common enablers include:
- DMARC set to p=none, allowing spoofed email addresses to reach clients without authentication warnings
- No monitoring for silent mailbox forwarding rules, which attackers add after an account compromise to observe live email threads
- Absence of MFA on email accounts, making phished credentials immediately usable
- No alerting for logins from unusual locations or via legacy protocols like POP or IMAP
- No client verification procedure for changes to bank details or payment instructions
These are not exotic controls. They are IT-layer configurations that prevent the specific attack pattern responsible for the majority of conveyancing fraud losses in the UK.
SRA and Cyber Essentials compliance controls
From April 2026, Cyber Essentials v3.3 tightened the baseline requirements for all certified organisations, with cloud services now fully in scope and MFA mandatory for all cloud service authentication including Microsoft 365, LEAP, Clio, and any platform accessing organisational data.
The SRA references Cyber Essentials as its benchmark for “reasonable steps” toward protecting client money and data.
For a solicitor’s practice, the controls that matter most are:
- MFA enforced on all accounts – email, case management, remote access, and any cloud service holding client data
- DMARC at p=reject on all firm email domains, with SPF and DKIM correctly configured
- Software and operating systems are patched within 14 days of a critical update release
- Immutable off-site backups protected against ransomware, with documented recovery procedures
- A written incident response plan specifying who does what in the first 24 hours, including ICO notification and SRA reporting where required
- Role-based access controls and prompt removal of access when staff leave
- Documented annual cybersecurity training for all staff
Firms holding a Criminal Legal Aid contract have been required to hold a valid Cyber Essentials certificate since 1 October 2025 under Legal Aid Agency contract terms.
We support the full certification process, from scoping and technical preparation through to the evidence your assessor needs.
For a broader view of what resilience planning should cover, our guide to business continuity and disaster recovery for small businesses is a useful reference point.
Microsoft 365 for legal firms: configuration, security, and support
Microsoft 365 has become the operational backbone of most UK legal practices. Email, calendars, Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Office apps feed directly into fee earner workflows every day, and the way the tenant is configured determines both how productive those workflows are and how exposed the practice is to data loss or account compromise.
The specific Microsoft 365 work we carry out for solicitors and law firms includes:
- Email security: anti-phishing, anti-spoofing, external sender banners, and malicious link protection
- DMARC, SPF, and DKIM setup and ongoing monitoring across all firm domains
- MFA enforcement and conditional access policies to restrict access from unmanaged devices or unusual locations
- SharePoint and OneDrive permission structure, external sharing controls, and information barrier configuration, where matters must be kept separate
- Teams security policies and guest access controls
- Licensing, user provisioning, and leaver processes — including prompt access revocation and secure mailbox handover
- Microsoft 365 backup for Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams
That last point matters more than most firms realise. Microsoft’s shared responsibility model means the firm, not Microsoft, is responsible for ensuring data is recoverable.
Email and SharePoint data can be lost through accidental deletion, account compromise, or ransomware – and Microsoft’s native retention tools are not a substitute for a proper backup.
Backup and business continuity for solicitors practices
A backup that has never been tested is not a backup. It is an assumption, and in a legal practice, assumptions about data recovery carry regulatory weight.
The questions worth asking about your current backup setup are more specific than “do we have one?“:
- Does it include the legal accounts database and client ledger records?
- Are backups immutable, meaning ransomware cannot encrypt or delete them?
- Is there a verified off-site or cloud copy, separate from the primary network?
- Has a restore actually been tested, and how long did it take?
- Does the recovery plan specify which systems come back online first?
The SRA Accounts Rules mean client account records have a higher recovery priority than almost anything else in a legal practice.
If a ransomware incident takes down the legal accounts system, the firm cannot operate client accounts or complete reconciliations until it is restored. Recovery order is not a technical detail – it is a regulatory one, and it needs to be documented and tested in advance, not improvised under pressure.
We help solicitor firms put proper backup and continuity arrangements in place, with tested recovery procedures and a documented plan that reflects the specific restoration priorities of a legal practice.
IT support for law firms in Birmingham and the West Midlands
Birmingham accounts for approximately 12,000 legal sector jobs and is one of the UK’s largest regional legal markets outside London.
Across the West Midlands more broadly, there are over 760 active legal services businesses, ranging from large commercial practices to specialist conveyancing, family law, and criminal legal aid firms – exactly the practice types where SRA compliance obligations, BEC fraud risk, and reliable case management access matter most.
Computercentric is based in Aldridge, near Walsall, giving us easy access to firms across Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Sutton Coldfield, Lichfield, Coventry, and the Black Country, without the travel overhead or surcharges that come with providers based further afield.
For a new law firm client, our onboarding process covers:
- A structured audit of your existing systems, software, and configurations
- Documentation of your case management and legal accounts setup
- Assessment of your Microsoft 365 security posture against SRA expectations
- A review of backup coverage and recovery procedures
- A clear gap analysis before anything becomes an incident
Most day-to-day support is delivered remotely, so your staff get help quickly, regardless of where they work. On-site cover for server work, hardware, network infrastructure, cabling, or office moves is available when needed. You can read more about how we work with regulated professional services businesses in our Think Insurance Services case study.
Managed IT services across the West Midlands & Staffordshire
We support small businesses and SMEs in each of the areas below — delivering the same structured, proactive IT service to every client, locally.
Birmingham
- Managed IT support
- Cybersecurity & EDR
- Cloud & Microsoft 365
Walsall
- Managed IT support
- Backup & disaster recovery
- Proactive monitoring
Wolverhampton
- Managed IT support
- Cybersecurity & compliance
- Network management
Sutton Coldfield
- Managed IT support
- Microsoft 365 management
- Business continuity
Lichfield
- Managed IT support
- Cybersecurity & EDR
- Backup & recovery
Aldridge
- Managed IT support
- Cloud services & hosting
- IT consultancy
Bournville
- Managed IT support
- Endpoint protection
- Business continuity
Frequently asked questions about IT support for solicitors and law firms
What IT support do law firms and solicitors actually need?
Most legal practices need helpdesk support for staff, Microsoft 365 management and security, case management system support for platforms such as LEAP, Proclaim, Clio, or Osprey, cybersecurity controls including MFA and DMARC configuration, backup and disaster recovery, and secure remote access for fee earners.
Firms holding Criminal Legal Aid contracts also need current Cyber Essentials certification as a Legal Aid Agency contractual requirement since October 2025.
How much does managed IT support for a solicitor’s firm cost?
Managed IT support for UK law firms typically costs between £40 and £85 per user per month for a mid-range service that covers helpdesk, monitoring, patching, email security, MFA, and backup management. Services with 24/7 security monitoring, Cyber Essentials certification support, and compliance documentation sit above this range.
The right starting point is a review of your actual setup, so the scope and cost reflect what your practice genuinely needs rather than a standard tier chosen before anyone has looked at your systems.
Can you support our case management software?
We support the IT environments that LEAP, Proclaim, Clio, Osprey, and Actionstep run within – covering endpoints, Microsoft 365, connectivity, backup, and user access management.
When an issue sits inside the application itself, we liaise directly with the software vendor on your behalf rather than leaving your team to manage two parallel support conversations.
What do we need in place to comply with SRA cybersecurity requirements?
The SRA’s current expectations centre on MFA for all accounts accessing client data or case management systems, DMARC at p=reject on your email domain, a documented and tested incident response plan, immutable off-site backups, software patched within 14 days of critical updates, and recorded staff cybersecurity training.
We can assess where your firm currently stands against these requirements as part of our onboarding process and help close any gaps before they become a regulatory concern.
Do we need Cyber Essentials?
If your firm holds a Criminal Legal Aid contract, Cyber Essentials certification has been required since 1 October 2025 under Legal Aid Agency contract terms – it is enforceable, and firms without it risk losing their contract.
For other practices, it is the benchmark that the SRA references in its guidance and is increasingly expected by professional indemnity insurers. We support the full certification process from scoping through to submission.
How quickly do you respond when something goes wrong?
Response times are defined in your service agreement, not left to discretion. For business-critical issues – systems down, email unavailable, case management inaccessible – our target is to have an engineer actively working on the problem within the hour.
We also aim to prevent most urgent issues from occurring by monitoring systems continuously, which means we often identify and resolve problems before they affect the team at all.
Can you support a firm with multiple offices?
Yes. We support multi-site firms across the West Midlands and beyond, including practices with staff working across different office locations and from home.
Multi-site setups require particular attention to network connectivity between sites, consistent security policy across all locations, and remote access that is both reliable and properly secured – all of which are covered as part of our standard managed service.
We already have an IT company. Is it worth switching?
The most common reasons law firms move providers are repeated outages during critical periods, slow or unpredictable response times, and a provider that does not understand their case management software, SRA obligations, or the cost of downtime in a billable-hour environment.
If any of those are familiar, it is worth a conversation. We are happy to carry out a no-obligation review of your current IT setup and give you an honest picture of where the gaps are.
What happens to our data if we end the contract?
Your data is yours. We maintain documentation of your systems, configurations, and security setup throughout the contract, and we carry out a structured handover of access and credentials to you or your incoming provider.
We are happy to walk through the exit process before you sign anything – a provider who makes this difficult is itself a risk worth taking seriously before you commit.
Proactive IT support for solicitors and law firms: work with us
Reactive IT support (the kind where someone arrives after the problem) works for businesses where the cost of downtime is low and deadlines are flexible. Neither of those things describes a solicitor’s practice. Fee earners need systems that work consistently, partners need confidence that client data is protected, and your COLP needs evidence of the controls in place, not a hope that nothing has gone wrong.
Our approach to IT support for legal firms is built on proactive management rather than incident response.
Systems are monitored continuously. Patches are applied within compliance windows. Backups are verified, not assumed. And when something does happen, we already know your case management platform, your Microsoft 365 configuration, and the recovery priority of your systems – because we have been managing them.
If your firm is dealing with recurring IT problems, uncertain about its SRA compliance position, or simply has not had a proper review of its IT setup in the past two years, that conversation is worth having before the next deadline.
Call us on 01922 830000 or contact us online to discuss your firm’s current IT and what a better setup would look like. If you are still weighing up your options, our articles on the benefits of managed IT services and why businesses choose to outsource IT support may help.
