Law firm turns to private cloud deployment to drive growth

 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.