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The law firm of the future

To attract top-flight fee-earners and big-billing clients, firms must modernise their approach to technology. Fee-earners expect the optimum working environment and tools to drive success for their clients, and your business.

So what is holding law firms back? And what can be done about it?

This whitepaper discusses the IT challenges law firms face, addresses blockers and sets out practical steps to creating a successful digital future.

Download

Top 5 takeaways from the whitepaper:

• Modernise legacy systems with cloud-ready, secure infrastructure to boost performance, scalability and efficiency.
• Optimise case management platforms to reduce downtime, speed up workflows and increase billable hours.
• Enhance user experience through automation and seamless digital tools that empower fee-earners and improve productivity.
• Adopt a secure-by-design approach with modern cybersecurity tools and training to protect data and maintain client trust.
• Leverage data and AI to gain insights, streamline operations and drive smarter, revenue-focused decision making.

Speak to a Legal IT Expert

"In years gone by the solution to driving revenue growth was to increase billable hours by growing headcount. Now, technology is helping firms maximise every minute of the billable hour, driving increased revenue without the requirement of increased staff costs."

Martin Ingham, CTO, LIMA

The post Whitepaper: The law firm of the future appeared first on Lima.

LIMA recently attended the Alternative Accountancy Technology Summit, where IT leaders from accountancy and audit firms got together to discuss the latest tech developments impacting the sector.

The trending topic at the event was – you guessed it – AI!

Speakers highlighted how adoption of AI in accountancy is already helping forward-thinking firms accelerate their operations and reduce internal costs. Which in turn reduces prices and increases demand for services.

Sprawling applications

Meanwhile, IT teams at many of the accountancy firms we spoke to at the event are battling with a huge number of applications for myriad different workflows and tasks. From onboarding clients, to running compliance checks to managing payroll – a typical practice uses 60 or 70 different apps within its day-to-day operations.

This app sprawl commonly includes SaaS, legacy and on-premise services. It throws up issues for IT teams around data duplication, security, credentials, permissions, training, technical complexity and cost.

Against the backdrop of this application sprawl, containing and controlling data becomes a greater challenge. With the introduction of AI tools to the mix, there is a risk that data could potentially be mishandled or inadvertently misused within AI systems, exposing your organisation to data leaks.

AI adoption

We’re not here to be the party poopers. AI is here and it’s having a massive impact in every sector. Those that refuse to adapt will be left behind. But there are ways to manage and control the use of AI in your organisation that doesn’t leave you exposed to major risk.

Here are just a few examples of how accountancy firms are adopting AI.

AI use cases in accountancy

Five ways to remain secure while adopting AI

1. Encrypt your data

Your systems process sensitive financial data. So it’s important that data is encrypted both at rest and in transit. This adds an extra layer of protection, preventing unauthorised access even if data is compromised. Using strong encryption protocols helps safeguard client information, especially in accounting.

2. Conduct regular system audits and risk assessments

AI systems should be continuously monitored to detect any potential vulnerabilities or breaches. Regular security audits and risk assessments can help identify and address weaknesses in security access, AI algorithms or integrations with other systems. By proactively assessing the risks, accountancy firms can mitigate the chances of data leaks or unauthorised access.

3. Adopt role-based access control (RBAC)

With AI systems processing vast amounts of sensitive data across multiple applications, it’s important to restrict access based on roles. Role-based access control ensures that only authorised employees can access or modify specific information. This helps prevent unauthorised viewing or manipulation of client data and ensures a clear trail of who accessed what data and when.

4. Prioritise compliance with data protection frameworks

Accountancy firms must comply with data protection regulations, and many choose to comply with frameworks like Cyber Essentials Plus to support their security and governance posture. When implementing AI, ensure the technology supports your compliance needs with these regulations, particularly in how personal and financial data is collected, stored and processed. There is great advice available from both the ICAEW and ACCA on this subject.

5. Train employees on data security best practices

Human error is often a leading cause of data breaches. It’s essential to train your staff on the importance of data security, particularly when using AI tools. Ensure they understand best practices, such as using strong passwords, recognising phishing attempts and understanding the risks and limitations of AI. Regular training can help employees be vigilant about security and reduce the risk of accidental data exposure.

Join our upcoming webinar, examining how IT teams in accountancy practices can revolutionise end user experience, strengthen security posture and help their organisations drive greater productivity and profitability.

Sign up here: WEBINAR: How are IT services driving better business outcomes for accountancy practices – LIMA – Insight-led IT services

LIMA offers a range of free assessments, including cyber resilience assessments and AI readiness assessments. We can help you on your journey to successful AI adoption.

With over 27 years’ experience supporting organisations with design and delivery of IT strategy, could LIMA be your perfect partner?

Contact the team at 0345 345 1110 or enquiries@lima.co.uk.

The post Lessons from Alternative Accountancy: don’t sacrifice security in the rush to AI adoption appeared first on Lima.

LIMA’s recent Elevate event welcomed more than 20 IT professionals to the National Football Museum for a day of discovery and discussion on AI, Copilot and Power Platform.

Our Head of Product, Ollie Potts, unpacked lessons from our own journey to Copilot, and our partners at Westcoast Cloud demonstrated some of the latest Copilot functionality, including how Copilot now integrates with elements of Power Platform.

If you missed out on the day, or you want a recap, we’ve pulled together five big takeaways from the event.

1. AI is already here, and 75% of people are already using AI at work

Perhaps the important point to note from these stats is that 78% of people already using AI at work are bringing their own tools to the table, rather than using systems managed and secured by their IT team.

Using an unmanaged AI product like Chat GPT within a business can pose risks. Without proper oversight, these systems could expose your business to data leaks, and generate inaccurate or inappropriate content, leading to potential reputational damage or legal issues.

Unmanaged AI may also not integrate seamlessly with existing business processes and tools, resulting in inefficiency and disruption.

It’s a safe bet that your end users are already using AI, so it’s important for your organisation to make a proactive decision about how and where they want their employees to use AI. By providing the guardrails of a managed system, aligned to approved documentation and information within your business, you can deliver an AI assistant that’s reliable, secure, and integrated with the approved tools you want your end-users to work with.

2. Preparedness is critical

When beginning your Copilot (or any AI) activation, laying the groundwork in advance is critical.

There is a lot to think about, and a lot of work to be done, but the ROI is potentially huge.

Here are some of the steps you need to take ahead of activation, if you’re considering Copilot:

1. Establish use cases and goals
2. Conduct a thorough risk assessment and establish mitigation measures
3. Review existing licensing arrangements
4. Review your existing M365 configuration
5. Review your existing data and folder structure
6. Appoint a team to support the wider rollout > it’s not just an IT effort

At LIMA, we’ve been through this exact process ourselves and have developed a Copilot Activation Assessment based on our learnings with Copilot, and our vast experience at deploying new software and hardware solutions. You can benefit from our experience today, with a free Copilot Activation Assessment.

Register your interest for a free Copilot Activation Assessment from LIMA

3. The features of Copilot are astounding, and they’re only getting better

Imagine having a complex report, showing it to Copilot, and asking it to pull out the important insights into an email or one pager ready to edit and share onwards. Copilot does it.

Imagine missing a Teams call and asking Copilot to summarise the elements of the discussion that you need to know about. For example, “renewing your MSP’s contract”. Copilot does it.

Imagine telling Copilot exactly what you want to do with some data in Excel, and Copilot not only creates the formula and pulls the data into the relevant columns, but also creates pivot tables and provides visualised insights from within the data.

Imagine creating a sales proposal for a new customer based on the data and templates you already have in your organisation, bringing in all of the context and experience your business has within its document library and systems. Copilot does it.

4. Power Apps is being underused by the SMB market

At LIMA we are incredibly excited about the opportunities Copilot offers to supercharge your organisation’s efficiency, but there is groundwork and internal education required to deliver Copilot securely.

Your organisation generates huge amounts of content and data, which Copilot could make much more valuable. But with great power comes great responsibility, and without proper management in the age of AI, this data can suddenly be opened up to loss or misuse.

Incorrect setup or configuration of AI systems can lead to data being improperly stored or transmitted, increasing the risk of data loss. What’s more, AI systems that continuously learn and update their models could overwrite existing data, leading to loss of historical data if not properly backed up.

Here are some important questions to start thinking about before you hand over the Copilot keys to enthusiastic employees!

5. Feedback from early adopters has been excellent!

Of Copilot early adopters surveyed, 75% said the service made them more productive, and 68% said it improved the quality of their work. Some users are already saving more than 10 hours a month, and on average users said it made them 30% faster at writing documents and creating presentations.

Need help getting your organisation AI ready?

Sign up for Elevate 2025 here.

The post Five takeaways from LIMA Elevate appeared first on Lima.

How LIMA works with NetApp to unlock benefits

Unlocking more possibilities with NetApp: An Overview

As experts in cost-effective data storage and security solutions, we’re thrilled to announce that LIMA showcased at NetApp Insight Vegas – the yearly kickoff event that shares the most recent advancements and innovations in the data storage and security industry. The renowned technology conference brings together international data and digital infrastructure specialists to collaborate and exchange ideas. At LIMA, we found the event to be a terrific opportunity to discuss our ongoing work with NetApp over the past two years, specifically in respect to our multi-tenant sovereign cloud platform.

Our speaker, Ollie Potts, Pre-sales Architect at LIMA, addressed the four primary concerns of contemporary businesses: security, simplicity, sustainability, and cost-effectiveness, and showcased how we have driven these within LIMA Cloud.

In this blog, we discuss how we’ve been working with NetApp to unlock more, and outline how LIMA’s cost-effective and eco-friendly solutions can strengthen your business.

Security

At LIMA, we believe that online security is a critical requirement for all organisations that operate in the digital domain. Our partnership with NetApp is solidified in our joint priority to bring secure data storage to all users, with modern, proactive protection from the growing threat of ransomware.

Using our Security by Design framework, which we’ve integrated into all of our systems, we approach security from a holistic angle and incorporate security principles into everything we do. This essentially means that we analyse every decision, task, and action we take from a security stance first, asking ‘how will this affect security?’ We know that being secure online is vital for our clients’ professional ethics as well as upholding compliance with security regulations. Through our partnership with NetApp, we’re able to deliver cutting-edge security through NetApp’s continuous development and implementation of product security standards, ensuring our clients have the most modern form of protection.

With regard to ransomware in particular, NetApp’s Ransomware Recovery Guarantee increases confidence in the security of your data storage and offers compensation in the event that data copies cannot be restored. The Ransomware Recovery Guarantee has built-in ransomware protection features that allow it to quickly block malicious file types as well as identify and stop rogue administrators or users through multi-admin verification. These useful features will provide innovative safety that works in unison with your data storage system.

Simplicity

In order to use your technology to best reflect your primary business goals and needs, you must have a firm grasp of it. Your tech needs to be straightforward and simple to use in order for you to use it effectively. NetApp shares this vision with us, with an ambition to ease data storage as a service. As a result, NetApp has developed a unified data storage “centre,” spanning multiple on-premises and public cloud storage solutions. This allows users to access a unified control panel from which they can file, block, and object workloads within a single operating system.

We also believe that a simple yet thorough approach aids transparency, for both the client and the provider, making it easier and quicker to identify any possible problems, from security to user interferences. For example, performance bottlenecks are one of the main causes of incidents impacting the user interface. Infrastructure contention, or having more demands placed on the platform than it can handle, is the primary root of most performance bottlenecks. Our simplified approach aids transparency of these issues, allowing us to skillfully manage our customers’ needs and platform capacity, mitigating incidents.

We focus on quality over quantity, believing that a comprehensive yet straightforward approach is optimal for delivering a service that is efficient, accessible for our clients, and tailored to an organisation’s demands. NetApp’s ability to apply Adaptive Quality of Service, alongside their Cloud Insights product, means that we can optimise capacity planning and forecasting, helping us to achieve more insight and delivery, without the need for more equipment or hassle.

In summary, simplicity is important for allowing us to see cause and effect correlations, enabling issues to be identified and resolved quickly. Possessing less equipment additionally makes our solutions easier to use and manage, reducing downtime and minimising possible incidents.

Sustainability

Recent change in compliance regulation places a greater emphasis on sustainability and emission reduction, resulting in businesses placing growing importance on achieving sustainability goals. Selecting an eco-friendly solution provider can assist you in achieving your sustainability objectives without sacrificing efficiency.

At LIMA, we’ve been working hard with NetApp to improve our sustainability practices across the board. Eco-oriented innovation is built into every NetApp product to assist users in meeting their sustainability objectives, while reducing expenses across security, storage and cloud services.

Additionally, we’ve reduced our equipment footprint while actually expanding our platform capacity – utilising a more efficient way of managing our operations to deliver more while using less. In an effort to keep becoming a greener company, we have also decreased the amount of power we use and the amount of waste we produce annually.

Savings

Unlike other solution providers, LIMA is dedicated to shielding our clients from recurring price increases and only raises costs when is it absolutely required. We take great pride in our open pricing structures because we believe that modern enterprises must have cost predictability. As a result, our security and support services are billed annually per asset rather than per ticket, event, or request. With no additional fees or transaction costs, our clients will always know what they are going to be charged.

We differ from well-known solution providers like Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud in that we don’t use fluctuating product charges or transaction chargers, which impose higher fees the more you use a product. For businesses, this model can make charges extremely difficult to predict or budget for, which is why LIMA opts instead for a fixed yearly charge on our Cloud Services.

The digital advisor tools from Netapp, such as ActiveIQ, can also help you save by outlining the services most compatible with your goals. Our expert recommendations promise full honesty, with no added pressure or hard upsells, along with our round-the-clock support service.

Conclusion

We’ve been able to unlock some great benefits for businesses through our partnership with NetApp in the key areas where it matters the most. If you’d like to learn more about how LIMA can provide leading-edge IT solutions for your organisation, get in touch today!

Discover how we’re enhancing data storage and security. Contact one of our experts on 0345 345 1110 or enquiries@lima.co.uk

The post The Power of S: Security, Simplicity, Sustainability & Savings appeared first on Lima.

Limited spaces available!

We will contact you to confirm a slot.

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Join us for our cloud webinar | Five factors for successful cloud migration

We’re delighted to be launching the latest episode in our cloud webinar series, five factors for a successful cloud migration.

The recent transition to remote working has highlighted the need for digital resilience and most specifically an IT infrastructure that’s flexible, scalable and reliable. As a result, we’re seeing organisations wanting to review and develop their cloud strategy with some playing catch up against competitors that may have already made the switch.

Drawing upon our vast experience in the industry, we’re in the perfect position to provide straightforward advice for your cloud journey. That’s why our webinar on 29 April will focus on the most important factors to consider for achieving a successful cloud migration, from having the right cloud-first mindset to phasing the approach to achieve optimal results.

By joining our webinar, you will learn the top five factors to a successful cloud migration and hear from one of our customers, Claire Davidson from Transform Housing. Claire will participate in a Q&A session sharing an insight into their journey to the cloud and her first-hand experience of working in partnership with LIMA to migrate their services.

How to register

Unfortunately, this webinar has now passed, but don’t worry, you still have a chance to learn more about LIMA Cloud Services. Follow us on our social channels to find out more about our next upcoming cloud webinar and how to register.

How can LIMA help you on your cloud journey?

Attending our cloud webinar to learn more about how cloud migration is driving digital transformation and the factors to consider for a successful switch is a great way to kick-start your cloud journey, or to give you some advice along the way. However, LIMA can also provide additional support, advice and guidance with the use of our managed cloud solutions.

Whether you’re looking into your cloud options or need help deciding the best solution for your business, we can help guide the process with our cloud readiness assessments, strategy implementation and continuous optimisation.

We pride ourselves on taking a consultative approach so we can advise on the most appropriate services to migrate, which ones may need redesigning and some that may be more suited to staying on-premise. Click here to speak to one of our Account Directors to find out how we can help your business

The post Join us for our cloud webinar | Five factors for successful cloud migration appeared first on Lima.

Register for our webinar | How to accelerate digital business success with cloud optimisation

Join us on 29 July for a lunch and learn Q&A to find out how to maximise your cloud cost savings, performance and productivity with cloud optimisation.

The rapid increase in cloud adoption has seen many organisations now looking to take advantage of the value of cloud by migrating their applications and workloads. Cloud services are easy to implement and consume but are often left running without any review, continuous improvement, or any ongoing alignment to your business strategy.

So, as cloud computing becomes the norm, how do you ensure your applications are managed and optimised to ensure they are running efficiently and achieving the right results?

We’re delighted to be hosting our latest cloud webinar where you will discover how cloud optimisation delivers efficiency that ensures optimal performance and cost savings, whilst keeping your applications secure. We explore how identifying potential improvement opportunities in line with your business needs can ensure you get the most out of your cloud environment and boost your operational agility into the future.

Hear from Ollie Potts, LIMA’s Cloud and Optimise Manager as he presents a unique perspective on cloud optimisation – and how it can help you see business results faster.

Join us for our cloud optimisation webinar to discover:

• How optimising your cloud environment can ensure business success.
• The value of cloud in meeting business objectives.
• What LIMA’s cloud optimisation service offers.
• A Q&A session with our cloud experts.
• A free cloud optimisation workshop with a cloud consultant.

Claim your free cloud optimisation workshop

Register your place for our webinar and receive a free cloud optimisation workshop with one of our expert cloud consultants.

During the 30 minute session we will cover:

• An insight into the current cloud trends that we’re seeing in your market.
• We’ll explore more about your journey to cloud, including what you want to achieve and any challenges you may be facing.
• We’ll then provide you with several actionable points that you may want to investigate further including what areas you should be focusing on to suit your needs and potential improvement recommendations.

Click here to register your place

Join us for a live Q&A session where you can put your questions to our cloud experts.

When? Thursday 29 July 2021
Where? This is a virtual session, simply register your place here.

Click here to register your place to learn how to optimise your cloud costs and performance so you can focus on what matters most.

The post Register for our webinar | How to accelerate digital business success with cloud optimisation appeared first on Lima.