Supporting Schofield Sweeney's Digital Transformation

The IT team at Schofield Sweeney is ambitious and keen to innovate, exploring AI and automation to enhance its service to clients and empower its people to work more productively.

Like many legal services handling sensitive data, the firm is on the receiving end of 900+ spam and phishing emails a month, in addition to dealing with ever more stringent security compliance requirements.  This, coupled with handling support queries from a growing team working across three offices and from home, leaves little time to dedicate to innovation.

With our strategic advice and support, Schofield Sweeney has been able to introduce a more agile infrastructure and support model that empowers the firm to operate more securely and efficiently, freeing the IT team to plan for the future.

Like all firms, Schofield Sweeney was thrown a game-changing curveball by Covid.

Luckily, discussions to migrate from on-premises servers to the cloud were already underway, and an existing Citrix infrastructure enabled users to take desktop computers home. However, the crisis accelerated the need to invest in a more robust cloud environment over the longer term.

The decision was made to make the switch to Azure, and BCN was chosen to support the team in the migration.

“We decided to work with BCN because they gave us exactly what we wanted.” said Sandeep Singh.

Since the initial migration, the firm’s entire infrastructure is now in Azure, including its client files and case management platform – the bedrock of its operations.

With the switch to the cloud and the move to remote working, a growing challenge emerged. Access outside of the office exposed new vulnerabilities and a need for more stringent security measures.

Working together, Schofield Sweeney and BCN ensure that security is watertight. The firm is certified to Cyber Essentials Plus, the government backed scheme that gives organisations a framework of five standard yet essential security controls.

A new ticketing system, built by BCN as a Power App and integrated into SharePoint, has allowed the team to streamline and consolidate support requests. This enables the IT team to easily triage and allocate its time where it’s needed most.

Schofield Sweeney and BCN worked together in partnership to deliver;

Consolidated cloud infrastructure

Now, a centrally managed Azure Cloud environment optimises performance today and provides the scalability flexibility needed to meet the firms future growth requirements.

Improved Security Posture and protection

With Cyber Essentials and Azure security the firm are now more protected from cyber threats than ever, keeping their client data safe and reducing the risk of any downtime due to breaches.

Efficiency and innovation

The development of a bespoke Power App ticketing solution increases efficiency of day-to-day tasks for associates, whilst being cost efficient.

The roadmap for Schofield Sweeney and BCN includes some short-term projects. This includes auditing their 365 infrastructures to improve vulnerability management and security by implementing conditional access policies in addition to improving device management policies in Intune. But it’s also looking further ahead.

Like many, Schofield Sweeney is on the path to AI enablement. But beyond productivity enhancements, it has ambitions to connect AI with its SQL databases to enable advanced analytics and gain powerful new insights from its data. BCN, with its unique AI and data capabilities and experience helping hundreds of customers make the shift to automation in a way that works for them, is ready to share the journey.