The problem no one planned for
When flexible working became the norm for most law firms, it happened quickly. Fee earners moved between kitchen tables and office desks. Support staff started logging in from home on Friday afternoons. And somewhere in the middle of all that, someone — usually a partner or practice manager — inherited the job of keeping it all working.
If that sounds familiar, you are not alone. For small and mid-sized conveyancing firms across the Home Counties, remote and hybrid working has quietly become one of the biggest day-to-day IT headaches. Not because the technology does not exist to support it, but because managing that technology without a dedicated IT function is genuinely difficult.
What remote working actually demands from your IT setup
Supporting fee earners across multiple locations is not simply a case of handing everyone a laptop and a Teams login. Done properly, it requires a joined-up approach across several areas.
Secure access to practice systems. Conveyancing platforms like Osprey, LEAP, or Veyo are not designed to be accessed carelessly. Fee earners working from home need consistent, secure connections to these systems — and when those connections fail on a completion day, the consequences are immediate and costly.
Device management. When staff are working on home broadband networks and personal devices, the risk of a security incident increases considerably. Without proper device management policies in place, a single compromised laptop can expose client data, financial records, and your Microsoft 365 environment to serious risk.
A consistent IT experience wherever people are working. Staff should not have to wrestle with different setups depending on where they are sitting. When the experience is inconsistent, small problems multiply — password resets, connectivity issues, software that works in the office but not at home — and they all land with whoever is closest to the IT problem that day.
Why this tends to fall on the wrong people
In firms without a dedicated IT function, remote working support defaults to whoever is most technically confident. Sometimes that is a partner. Sometimes it is a practice manager already stretched across compliance, HR, and operations. Occasionally it is a freelance IT contact who is responsive when available but has no real visibility of your systems day-to-day.
None of these arrangements scale well. And in a conveyancing environment — where completion windows are tight, clients are anxious, and transactions move quickly — an unresolved IT issue at the wrong moment is not just an inconvenience. It reflects on the firm.
There is also a compliance dimension worth considering. The SRA expects firms to have appropriate controls around data security and business continuity. If fee earners are accessing client files remotely without proper security measures in place, that is an exposure that grows over time.
What a managed approach looks like in practice
Conveyancing firms that have moved to a managed IT model typically describe the same shift: problems get resolved before they become disruptions, and the partner or practice manager stops being the first call when something goes wrong.
In practical terms, managed support for a hybrid law firm means:
- Proactive monitoring of devices and systems, so issues are often caught before staff notice them
- Secure remote access configured and maintained properly, not patched together over time
- Microsoft 365 security management, including conditional access policies that control how and where your systems can be accessed
- A single point of contact for all IT issues, whether a fee earner is working from home in Guildford or sitting in the office in St Albans
- Consistent onboarding and offboarding, so when staff join or leave, their access is managed cleanly and securely
For firms using specialist conveyancing platforms, having an IT partner who understands how those systems behave — and can work alongside the platform’s own support — makes a genuine difference when something goes wrong under pressure.
A question worth asking your team this week
If a fee earner working from home cannot access your case management system at 9am on a completion day, how long does it take to resolve? Who do they call first? And what happens to that transaction in the meantime?
If the honest answer involves uncertainty, it is worth exploring what a more structured approach would look like. Other conveyancing firms in the region have made that shift and found it simpler than expected.
If you would like to see how we have helped similar firms across the Home Counties get remote working right, we are happy to walk you through what we have done for practices of your size — no commitment required. Get in touch with the Computer Care team and we will take it from there.