You know who owns and leases your operational equipment, or your buildings, plant and other physical facilities.

Can you say who controls your IT?

How flexible is your IT supply chain to meet your partnership’s ongoing needs?

Given how vital IT is to your legal practice, you need to be able to react to changing needs.  Are you locked in with any IT providers or staff members that you are not happy with or confident in?  If you find yourself thinking that the answer is ‘yes’ to this, then that’s a source of stress.

We’ve seen cases where software licensing and website domain names are registered against the IT provider, not the actual law firm.  This gives rise to who really owns these, and who is responsible for them? 

We’ve seen bad examples with internal IT staff having no documentation or implementing complex labour intensive solutions that seem to exist to justify their jobs.  In reality, its often just that there has been no pressure or support to clean these up.  In fact, in many practices, while there are multiple resources around accounting, support and obviously legal work itself, IT can be a blind spot; often there is just one person with limited oversight and support.

When you store your data in the cloud, does it remain ‘your’ data?

At Kinetics, we loathe the idea of term contracts, because we believe the relationship should inform the duration of our partnership rather than a contracted time period.  IT is so integral to your organisation, you need an IT business that you can rely on, rather than ones that rely on you.

That also means that systems should be documented, processes should be understood.  There can be no lock-in to a single person or organisation, just in case the unthinkable happens.  You should have control.  Do you have documentation telling you, or a new IT partner, how things are setup, why they are set up that way?, key contacts for various services, key password credentials and so forth?  We believe this is your information and you should have it available, but all too often we see IT partners withhold it when asked.  One common challenge is finding out about subscriptions you would have renewed, if only you had known about them – it’s a disaster to discover them only when things stop working as a result of key contracts expiring.