Checklist
Five signs your firm has outgrown its setup.
Nothing here needs a technician to check. Every one of them is something you can find out in your own office this afternoon, and any two of them together is usually the answer.
Written for firms of five to fifty people in Frederick County and the counties around it — mostly law firms, accounting practices, and medical and dental offices.
One person is the reason it works
There is somebody — a paralegal, an office manager, a partner who is good with computers — who knows where things are kept and what to restart. Nothing is written down, because it has never needed to be. This is the most common one and the easiest to miss, because from the inside it does not look like a problem. It looks like having a good person.
How to check
Ask yourself what happens if that person is away for three weeks. If the honest answer involves phoning them, you have found it.
You cannot answer the questionnaire without three phone calls
A large client’s in-house counsel staples a security questionnaire to the contract. Your insurer sends one at renewal. It asks who has access to what, how long you keep records, and whether the copies are held somewhere separate. If answering it means asking around and guessing at two of the boxes, the guess is the problem — not the form.
How to check
Find the last one you filled in. If you cannot find it, or you would answer it differently today, it was never a document. It was an afternoon.
Nobody has ever put a backup back
Almost every firm we walk into has backups. Far fewer have ever restored one. An untested copy is not a backup, it is a belief about a backup — and the morning you find out is the morning you needed it. The failure is usually not the copy itself. It is that the copy was of the wrong thing, or that nobody knows the password to the machine that reads it.
How to check
Ask for one file from three months ago — a specific one, by name. Time how long it takes to arrive. If nobody can, you already have your answer.
People who left still have keys
Somebody left in the spring. Their email was closed. Their login to the practice system, the portal the accountant uses, the account that pays for the phones — those tend to survive, because closing them is somebody’s job and it is nobody’s job. The related version is a shared login at the front desk: convenient, and it means you cannot say who opened which record, which is exactly the question you get asked after something goes wrong.
How to check
List everyone who has left in the last two years. For each one, name every system they could open. If the list takes more than a minute to write, it is not a list you have.
It always breaks on the worst possible morning
Not bad luck. The busiest morning is when everything is under load, when everyone is logged in at once, and when there is no slack to absorb a five-minute problem. A setup with room in it fails quietly on a Wednesday afternoon. A setup that has been outgrown waits for the Monday filing, or the first appointment, or the last week of the quarter.
How to check
Think of the last three things that went wrong. Write down the day and what was happening. If they cluster, it is capacity, not chance.
What to do with this
None of these on their own means very much. Two of them together usually means the setup was built for a smaller firm than the one you now run — which is a good problem, and a fixable one. Nothing here is urgent unless the third one is true, in which case it is the only one that matters this week.
Want somebody to check the other forty things?
The review is ninety minutes on site, no charge, and a written report a few days later that you keep whatever you decide to do with it. About half of them say the firm is in decent shape.
Or ten minutes on the phone first
About half the reports say you’re in decent shape. If that’s you, we say so and leave.