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MBA qualified IT Director with 25+ years experience in senior IT roles, with the last 16 in a Top 150 law firm. Expert in all aspects of IT provision and management with specialisms in legal technology, cybersecurity, and process digitization.

• An IT Director with 25 years experience in technology implementation and departmental management. Always developing a strong understanding of the businesses he has worked within to tailor the IT solution effectively.
• Extensive experience in the provision and development of cost-effective and highly reliable and secure IT services, focusing the delivery around the business needs and opportunities presented by technologies.
• Effective integration with other business departments to produce significant project successes across a wide variety of implementations including operating overheads, new technology implementations, re-imaging service delivery both to staff and clients, mergers, and the efficient management of company growth when the infrastructure both in IT and Office Space required enlarging to meet the growth cycles of the company.
• MBA Thesis explored the development of a balanced scorecard to measure the effectiveness of IT with organizational strategy and was awarded a distinction.
• Columnist for LPM Magazine and Advisory Board Member to Alternative Legal IT Event.

On joining one of the largest independent Solicitors in the South East of England (7 offices supporting approximately 240 staff spread over Surrey and South and Central London), Expert was tasked with preparing the Firm for its next stage of growth by modernizing its IT infrastructure and bringing together the disparate IT systems and processes from the 5 Firms that made up the original mergers and create a unified and effective IT Service and support experience for all staff across all sites.

Whilst carrying out this modernization, he also studied for an MBA under the support of the Firm in order to develop his skills in integrating the IT systems into the more general business operations of the Firm and to develop his managerial skills to a higher level. His specialism has been reporting tools and integration into business processes and their alignment with corporate strategy and was based on the Balanced Scorecard methodology.

Expert managed a team of 5 specialists directly and worked within a variety of project teams to deliver projects usually in the Project Manager position, generally to Prince2, whilst working with Heads of Department and the Firm’s Executive Committee to deliver value from the IT. One project that he incepted, developed, and delivered was awarded the Innovation in CRM by “The Lawyer” magazine, whilst he found time to also act as an occasional contributor to the Legal Support Network Journal “Legal Practice Management” and he also sat on the advisory panel for the “Alternative IT Legal Conference” which focuses on how IT can support and influence the strategic development of the mid-market law firm.

Whilst in this role and previous ones, Expert has spent significant time mentoring team members and by virtue raising their careers to higher roles either within or outside the Firm. The MBA has given him a strong commercial slant and allowed me to work strategically with key suppliers and outsourcers and to coordinate with them and his own internal team and business stakeholders to deliver successful projects across a diverse range of disciplines from platform migrations, office moves to training. For over the 10+ years Expert has been with the Firm, he has been the trusted expert sensing the IT landscape and implementing the correct technologies either internally or through outsourcing relationships which have provided the Firm with enviable reliability and security. He also works in close conjunction with the Firm’s business leaders discussing current technologies or future developments and communicating both a short and long-term road map on technology adoption within the business.

He maintains and develops the Firm’s Practice Management System, Advanced Legal’s Evolution and is presently working on a migration to Advanced Legal’s new flagship product, Advanced Legal Business. In his time at the Firm, he has developed the PMS, working on creating efficiencies through workflows and case plans as well as integrations with court forms software such as Laser Forms and Oyez. Expert has also run two data cleanse exercises during his 15-year tenure to ensure the data is kept accurate as well as working on the reporting aspects and integrating first Rekoop and currently Intapp Time 8 into the PMS to capture fee-earning time accurately.

Expert is highly skilled in workflow development and have spent significant time understanding these tools both within Evolution and in ADP’s HRNet where he regularly creates and runs resource-based reporting. For the migration, he is the Project Manager, architecting the strategy for moving the Firm from its current platform, ensuring the integrity of the data, the timeliness of the project, and ensuring that the user base is kept fully involved and engaged in the process to ensure wide acceptance on go live. In order to do this, Expert creates focus groups to both capture ideas on improving system use and generate buy-in to the project allowing him to eliminate potential hurdles. He is also knowledgeable on SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services), Digital Dictation solutions such as BigHand and Diktamen as well as an excellent knowledge of the Microsoft Office suite.

Expert has full and extensive experience in all aspects of IT, including virtualization, cloud and Hybrid Cloud (Saas, BaaS, PaaS, IaaS), security (endpoint, perimeter, etc), department and budget management, Disaster Recovery Planning, WAN, project roll-out, mobility, the thin client as well as software development and the management of the technology training regime across the business whilst acting as an interpreter of technology to the business. Wider skills include Change Process, IT governance, Stakeholder management, and Leadership as well as “process simplification” as well as a strong understanding of the whole spectrum of IT including Cloud, Telephony, Database, and Mail as well as scripting and networking protocols. He has also been project lead on six mergers into TWM Solicitors as well as head office and satellite office relocations.

Over the last 5 years, he has become a cybersecurity expert through a combination of real world experience and collaboration with industry leaders, adopting Artificial Intelligence based solutions to protect the Firm whilst also working extensively in training the user base to become the “first line of defense” for the network. He has strong expertise in Crowdstrike, Sophos, Fortinet, and DarkTrace. Other areas of development are the world first of combining Microsoft’s RDP APK with the Blackberry SDK via the AppDome platform to produce a highly secure connectivity solution for our Fee Earners on Android tablets and adopting a Firmwide roll out of a Learning Management System which will create tailored “learning paths” for our various employee roles to ensure they are highly skilled and productive.

IT Skill Set:
Windows Server and workstation, Active Directory, VMWare, SAN, Exchange, Azure, virtualization, SQL, Veeam, ARCserve, Veritas, Switches, Cloud Telephony, RDS, Firewalls, MDM, Crowdstrike, Sophos, DarkTrace, Fortinet, Microsoft Office, and Office 365, Zerto, Rekoop, Intapp, Oyez, Network Switches, Thin Client computing, Blackberry, CYOD/BYOD, Cyber Essentials, Rekoop, Intapp, Powershell, scripting, DNS