Lanyon Bowdler LLP reaps a harvest of efficiency with BES12.

The Organisation

Lanyon Bowdler LLP is a firm of solicitors serving Shropshire, Herefordshire and the surrounding areas, including Mid and North Wales. The firm is recommended in 14 categories in the 2016 edition of the Legal 500, the leading UK legal directory. The firm’s portfolio of services includes Company & Commercial, Employment, Clinical Negligence, Agriculture & Estates, Family, Planning, Education, Criminal Law, and Commercial Property.

The Challenge

Lanyon Bowdler LLP operates a mixed mobile estate, serving 240 users. With a practice that serves many rural communities, including farms and agricultural businesses, mobility is a key enabler of its highly-regarded standard of service to clients.

With the rapid evolution of mobile technologies, the need arose to standardise on a single enterprise mobility management platform. Lanyon Bowdler consulted Appurity, who took on the migration of the entire estate, including personally-owned devices, to BlackBerry BES12.

“Until now, we have always managed this kind of migration in-house. This time, the complexity called for specialist knowledge and experience. Appurity’s input meant we could stay focused on our strategic priorities, leaving the move to BlackBerry BES12 to the people who really knew the technologies and processes involved.” Robin Thain, IT Manager, Lanyon Bowdler

The Solution

With so many clients based in more remote locations, mobility is an essential part of the firm’s day-to-day operations. Lawyers equipped with smartphones and tablets can access files and other details of matters while sitting with a client, rather than having to return to their offices when a query cannot be resolved on the spot.

“Clients take this kind of rapid response for granted these days,” observes Robin Thain, IT Manager for Lanyon Bowdler. “A significant part of our strong reputation and competitive advantage comes from our ability to deliver a very high level of personalised service, and we can’t do that without an effective mobile deployment to support our lawyers.”

Like many legal practices, Lanyon Bowdler adopted BlackBerry® smartphones as the platform for the firm’s mobility strategy. The inherent security and ease of management were invaluable in a profession in which client confidentiality and data security are business-critical concerns.

“Naturally, the protection of our client’s data was the primary concern,” says Robin Thain. “We knew and trusted the BlackBerry platform, so BES12 was the obvious answer for us.

“However, with the diversity of devices and operating systems we now have under management, we were concerned about the complexity of the task. The practice is in the process of a number of digital transformation projects, and we felt it would be more cost-effective to entrust this one to specialists.”

Lanyon Bowdler consulted Appurity. “They know BlackBerry inside out, and they know the legal profession pretty well too,” says Robin Thain. “We could see that the learning curve would be short, and that the project was likely to proceed smoothly, even though we had outsourced it.”

The Result

For many legal practices, one of the main challenges of effective enterprise mobility management(EMM) is the impact users can have on the integrity of the security.

“Obviously, our lawyers take confidentiality very seriously, and they understand the importance of data security,” says Robin Thain. “But you cannot expect busy lawyers to trouble themselves with the finer points of IT security best practice.

“The beauty of BES12 was that we could roll it out with minimal disruption to the users, no matter what device they were using. Appurity designed the migration to suit the way our lawyers work, so we could do the internal migration in the background and allow our lawyers to continue with their day-to-day work.”

Appurity continues to support the EMM deployment, giving Robin Thain and his team one less routine task to distract them from their transformation programme.

“Appurity have more than exceeded our expectations, both in terms of the technical aspects and the service they provide,” concludes Robin Thain. “It’s a practical, efficient and cost-effective partnership.”