The outgoing IT Director's retirement is both a handover and a moment of risk. Institutional knowledge - vendor relationships, undocumented decisions, team dynamics - lives in people, not systems. A structured transition plan, built with the outgoing Director rather than around them, protects the firm and the team.
This also matters for morale. The IT team will be watching how their departing leader is treated. Handling it well sends a signal about the kind of Director I intend to be.
Before any decisions, I need to understand the firm from the inside. That means structured conversations with fee earners, support staff, practice group heads, and partners, from all offices - not to fix things immediately, but to understand what works, what frustrates, and what people have stopped asking for because they assume nothing will change.
This is the foundation of the Listen phase in my Listen, Shape, Deliver methodology. The shape of everything that follows depends on the quality of this listening.
Regardless of current confidence levels, an incoming IT Director must own the security posture. I cannot lead a function I have not stress-tested. A thorough review of controls, processes and exposure - not to find fault, but to build a foundation I can stand behind.
Law firms are high-value targets. Client data, transaction records, commercially sensitive communications. The regulatory consequences of a breach extend well beyond IT. This is a board-level risk and I would treat it as one from day one.
AI is already in the building. Fee earners are using tools that have not been sanctioned, assessed, or understood by IT. That is not a criticism - it is a reality in every firm right now. The risk is not that people are using AI; it is that they are doing so without a framework that protects the firm and its clients.
A clear policy, a usage framework, and a communication plan - built with the business, not handed down to it - is the first step. This creates the platform for everything that follows in the Next horizon.
The migration from iManage Work to iManage Cloud is already in flight. The priority is not to restart it but to ensure it completes cleanly - with proper adoption, training, and bedding-in across all offices and practice groups.
I have direct experience of this exact transition at Steele Raymond LLP, where I led the iManage Cloud migration. That gives me an informed view of the risks, the adoption challenges, and the decisions that determine whether the platform delivers its intended value.
Managing a team of approximately 20 internal staff alongside a Xerox managed service arrangement requires early clarity on roles, accountability, performance expectations and ways of working. A managed service that has previously underperformed needs a reset - clear SLAs, defined escalation paths, and a relationship built on mutual accountability rather than managed dissatisfaction.
The internal team also needs to understand how I work, what I expect, and what they can expect from me. That conversation happens early and in person.
Having validated the foundation in Now, Next is where we build. A maturity model assessment gives us a benchmark. From there, the work is structured: tooling gaps, incident response capability, supply chain risk, privileged access management, and the ongoing education of every person in the firm.
Security is not a project with an end date. It is a capability that needs to be built, maintained, and evolved continuously. By the end of the Next horizon, Clarke Willmott's security posture should be something the partnership actively understands and is confident in.
The people who generate revenue for Clarke Willmott spend the majority of their working day in technology. Case management, document production, client portals, time recording, mobile working - if any of these are slower, harder or less capable than they should be, the firm is leaving productivity on the table.
A structured review of what fee earners actually need - not what IT thinks they need, and not what vendors are selling - followed by a costed and prioritised plan to deliver it. This is one of the clearest signals an IT Director can send: that IT understands the business it serves.
Clarke Willmott already has the data. ELITE 3E holds financial and matter data. iManage holds documents. HR systems hold workforce data. Telephony, CRM, risk and compliance platforms each hold their own. None of it talks to the rest.
CW Heartbeat is the proposed solution: a unified data layer that draws from every source, normalises it, and puts the right information in front of the right people - partners, practice group heads, BD, finance. Built on Microsoft Fabric and Azure, it turns fragmented reporting into genuine business intelligence.
This is not a data engineering project. It is the foundation for every strategic decision the firm will make in the Later horizon.
Having established what is permitted in Now, the Next horizon is about enabling AI deliberately. The highest-value use cases in legal - document review, precedent research, contract analysis, time recording assistance, first-draft generation - are well established. The question is not whether to adopt them, but how to do so in a way that is safe, auditable, and genuinely useful.
This means building the governance infrastructure for AI deployment, selecting and piloting tools with specific practice groups, measuring outcomes, and scaling what works. It also means building AI literacy across the firm - so that fee earners understand both the capability and the limits of the tools they are using.