UK-based Taylor Vinters is a firm of solicitors representing a variety of clients that include businesses, individuals and not for profit organisations from its Cambridge headquarters and offices in London and Singapore.
Its clients, drawn from sectors including technology, property, horse racing, food and education, range from high net worth individuals and university spin-offs through to national charities, small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs), FTSE listed businesses and Fortune 500 multinationals.
Taylor Vinters employs 120 lawyers and offers over 200 diverse, specialised legal services, such as acquisition finance, manufacturing agreements, patents, trademarks and copyright, and university research agreements.
Ed Turner, managing partner at Taylor Vinters with leadership and business management responsibilities says the company used cloud services to accelerate its growth.
“Taylor Vinters is a £16.2-million turnover law firm, now based out of Cambridge, London and Singapore,” Turner said. “But in 2009, at the time we first started using cloud-based technology, we were a single-office business in Cambridge.” The firm had reached a point where the existing IT infrastructure could no longer scale to support its rapidly evolving business needs.
“We’d intended to embark on a major programme of change within the organisation as a response to huge change in the legal sector, not only as a result of the general climate of global economic instability, but also imposed by new regulations that for the first time allowed law firms to take investment from external investors, outside of the law,” Turner explained.
This effective deregulation of its market sector prompted Taylor Vinters to strategically reposition its business in order to capitalise on new international markets and in London.
During the process of, as Turner put it, “buying new kit” to provide additional server capacity in support of the change programme, the management and IT teams at Taylor Vinters realised it would difficult to scale its existing infrastructure to meet growing demand. “One of the major concerns was to be able to reliably warranty our clients that we would always have service when they expected us to have it,” he said.
With a relatively small IT team, a number of servers onsite and others hosted at a local data centre, business-critical IT functions, like disaster recovery (DR) and backup, had become difficult to manage. In addition, the fact that its business operations were expanding physically and becoming increasingly complex led Taylor Vinters to better equip and align IT to support these changes.
The firm was already talking to a number of IT suppliers about new servers, including Proact, when it began to also explore outsourcing alternatives. “Proact was the only one that elicited from us what our underlying problem was and suggested a cloud-based solution,” says Turner. He added that, given its size, if Taylor Vinters wanted to meet client expectations, it simply could not be in a position it found itself in a few years prior, where its main Exchange platform – essential for client contact – was down for three days.
"Discussions with Proact took place in conjunction with our IT director, which reassured him and his team that cloud IT services would free them up to be able to deliver change for us in the organisation, rather than spending time ‘keeping the lights on,’" continues Turner.
"It was a huge undertaking to shift us from where we were to a managed solution. But, as discussions moved from board to IT level over the next three years, some of the additional services we now use have evolved out of the initial implementation, where the IT director has said, ‘if you’re taking on this, you might as well also supply us that as well.”
The law firm now runs a private enterprise cloud from Proact, which includes infrastructure and software-as-a-service (IaaS and Saas), as well as backup-as-a service (BaaS), DRaaS, support and consultancy. Although the managing partner said the backup and DR services were the first to be implemented, where the firm "did not everything over on day one,” but rather grew its confidence in the cloud-based services provided by Proact slowly.
"Once the first server storage implementation had gone well and we could see that we were getting the service levels agreed, then Proact have gradually taken on more of our IT systems.”
The cloud IT services from Proact has provided Taylor Vinters with increased performance and enhanced resilience, as well as fulfilling Taylor Vinters’ need for flexibility to support growth. “The benefits of the cloud IT services have fundamentally been a more reliable system with less downtime,” Turner said. “Secondly, when I reflect on it, how easy it has made it to open other offices.”
Turner explains, "because of the IT setup we’ve got, using Citrix remote working, effectively allows us to set up an office anywhere we want and someone can login via a machine that we provide and they’re up and running, while we can also work from home. The reliability of the underlying IT system and the capacity it’s got means we can scale in a way that we could never have even considered before.”
Matt Meyer, Taylor Vinters chief executive, endorses this view: “involving Proact has freed up my IT team to work on other strategic projects within the business such as putting in new service delivery systems for our clients and helping to increase process and efficiency within the business.”
“The transition to cloud IT services has been a huge enabler,” Turner says, citing a project to reduce print, filing and physical storage costs through the implementation of Autonomy iManage as a virtual work system to digitise authorisations and documentation.
