Managed IT is a model where an outside firm takes responsibility for your IT environment on an ongoing basis — proactively maintaining, monitoring, securing, and improving it — for a predictable monthly fee. It contrasts with ad-hoc support, where you call someone only when something is broken.

How is managed IT different from a break-fix arrangement?

Break-fix is reactive: you only pay when something breaks, and the IT firm only profits when something breaks. Managed IT is proactive: a fixed monthly fee creates the right incentives — the firm makes more money when fewer things go wrong.

When should a law firm switch to managed IT?

Most firms benefit from managed IT once they have around 15 fee-earners or more, particularly if they handle confidential client data and need SRA-aligned controls. The economic case is usually obvious by 25 fee-earners.

Managed IT vs ad-hoc support: what changes when you have a plan

Most law firms start the same way: a partner who is “good with computers,” or a friendly local consultant who pops in when things break. It works fine until it doesn’t — typically around the 20-fee-earner mark, when the cost of an unscheduled outage starts to be felt in billable hours rather than in afternoons.

This article is for managing partners and practice managers wondering whether the transition to managed IT is worth making. The short answer: yes, and probably sooner than you think. The longer answer is below.

Ad-hoc support: what you actually buy

Ad-hoc IT — also called “break-fix” or “time-and-materials” — is a transactional model. Someone bills you when they fix a thing. The implications are predictable:

Reactive by design. The IT firm only makes money when something breaks. There is no commercial incentive to prevent the break.
No visibility. Nobody is looking at your environment when you’re not actively asking them to. Patches drift. Backups silently fail. Permissions accumulate.
No plan. Strategic IT decisions — when to refresh the laptops, what to do about the partner working from a country house, whether your practice-management software is still fit for purpose — happen by accident, if at all.
Variable spend. Some months are quiet. Some months are not. You can’t budget for the not-quiet months.

For a 5-person firm, this is fine. For a 25-person firm with SRA obligations and £4m of annual revenue running through Microsoft 365, it isn’t.

Managed IT: what changes

Managed IT is a fixed-fee model. You pay per user per month; the IT firm takes ongoing responsibility for keeping your environment current, secure, and aligned with your firm’s needs. Three things change immediately:

01. The incentives flip. A managed-IT firm makes more profit when fewer things go wrong. Time spent fixing the same problem twice is time the firm doesn’t recover. The cheapest path to profit is preventing problems in the first place.

02. Strategy becomes part of the relationship. Most reputable managed-IT contracts include some form of quarterly review — what we call a vCIO session. The conversation shifts from “the email server crashed” to “we’re hiring three new fee-earners next quarter; here’s the kit, the licences, and the security implications.”

03. Compliance becomes routine. SRA expectations, Cyber Essentials, GDPR, ISO 27001 — these stop being annual fire-drills. They become ambient outcomes of how the firm is run.

What it costs to delay

The honest list:

Outages last longer. Without proactive monitoring, problems get noticed when a fee-earner can’t work — usually mid-afternoon Friday. Fixing them then is harder, slower, and more expensive than preventing them.
Insurance gets harder. Cyber-insurance underwriters now ask very specific questions about access controls, MFA, backup integrity, and patching cadence. The answers are easy if you have managed IT. They’re awkward if you don’t.
Audits become projects. Without continuous alignment, every SRA file review or client security questionnaire becomes a six-week scramble. With managed IT, the answers are already on the page.
The senior partner becomes the IT director. This is the one nobody puts on the spreadsheet. Time spent thinking about IT problems is time not spent on fee-earning work, client relationships, or actually running the firm.

The transition itself

Switching from ad-hoc to managed IT is less disruptive than most firms fear. A reputable managed-IT firm will:

Audit your existing environment and document it (often more thoroughly than the previous arrangement ever was).
Migrate licence ownership to your firm’s name where it isn’t already (a surprisingly common gap).
Standardise device builds, security baselines, and backup posture — usually in the first 60 days.
Establish the cadence of strategic reviews so the partners know where IT decisions are made.

Most transitions happen invisibly to fee-earners. The first thing they notice is that the helpdesk is now answered by someone whose name they recognise.

Is managed IT right for every firm?

No. A genuinely small firm — 5 fee-earners, off-the-shelf Microsoft 365, no specific compliance overlays — can probably run on ad-hoc support for some time. The economic case for managed IT becomes clear around the 15-to-20-fee-earner mark and is usually obvious by 25.

If you’re between those numbers and uncertain, the honest answer is to ask. We’re happy to tell you that you don’t need us yet — we’d rather have that conversation now than convert a forced sale later.