Most IT companies will tell you they “serve legal.” Very few have ever sat in a firm at 4:45 on a filing deadline while the document management system decides to reindex. Here’s how to tell the difference before you sign a contract.
The short answer
A law firm’s IT provider should be able to name the software you run before you tell them, explain how they’d handle a litigation hold, and describe a real migration they’ve done between practice management platforms. If they can’t do those three things in the first meeting, they’re a general IT shop that added “legal” to their website.
Ask them about your software, not theirs
Every IT company has a stack they like to sell. That’s fine. What matters is whether they know yours. Ask how they’d support Clio, Filevine, CASEpeer, NetDocuments, iManage, Worldox, or whatever your firm actually runs. Listen for specifics: known quirks, integration headaches, what breaks during updates. A provider who has lived with these tools will have opinions. One who hasn’t will change the subject to their own toolset.
Ask how they handle eDiscovery and litigation holds
This is the fastest tell. A general IT provider hears “litigation hold” and thinks “backup.” A legal-savvy one knows a hold means preserving mailboxes, chat, and files in place, suspending retention policies for specific custodians, and being able to prove nothing was altered. If they can’t walk you through how that works in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, they will learn it on your matter, at your expense.
Ask about confidentiality beyond the basics
Firms carry obligations most businesses don’t: client confidentiality rules, conflicts walls, cyber insurance questionnaires that get more demanding every renewal, and clients who send their own security requirements before they’ll engage you. Your provider should be comfortable with ethical walls, access controls by matter, and filling out a client’s vendor security questionnaire without making you translate.
Ask them to describe a migration they’ve actually done
Moving a firm from one practice management or document system to another is where legal IT gets hard. Data maps don’t line up, custom fields have twenty years of history, billing rates and trust accounting have to survive intact. Ask for a real example. How long did it take, what went wrong, what would they do differently. A vague answer here means you’d be their first.
Ask what happens when a partner calls
Law firms run on people who bill by the hour and don’t have time to open a ticket. Ask who answers the phone, whether it’s the same people every time, and whether those people will know your firm’s name and setup without looking it up. Call center support is a poor fit for a practice where a paralegal’s blocked afternoon is real money.
Why we wrote this
Raven Managed Services is an IT provider in Marietta, Georgia, working with law firms across metro Atlanta and nationally. Before starting Raven, our founders spent years at the largest legal-focused IT provider in the country. We wrote this because we’ve seen what happens when a firm hires a general IT company that oversold its legal experience, and we’d rather you ask the hard questions up front, even if you don’t ask them of us.
Common questions
Not always. A solo or two-attorney office on Clio and Microsoft 365 can do well with a solid general provider. Past ten or fifteen people, or once you're running document management, eDiscovery, or complex billing, legal experience starts paying for itself.
Managed IT is ongoing: helpdesk, monitoring, patching, security. A consultant does projects. Most firms need both, ideally from a provider that can do the project and then live with the result.
Ask for two references at firms of similar size and practice area. Then ask those references what broke and how it was handled. Everyone's happy during the sales cycle.