Professional services
Legal, accounting and advisory firms run on a small number of systems that absolutely cannot fail, surrounded by a large number that grew up around individual practices. The estate is rarely complex. It is fragmented, and it is under audit.
The typical estate
- 01
Practice and matter management
The system of record for engagements, and usually the oldest thing in the estate.
- 02
Document management
Where the actual work product lives, with retention and privilege obligations attached to every file.
- 03
Time, billing and revenue
Directly tied to cash. Integration errors here are noticed within a day.
- 04
Microsoft 365
Email is frequently the real system of record, whether or not anyone intends it to be.
- 05
Client-facing portals
Increasingly expected, and increasingly the subject of the client’s own security review.
Where it strains.
- Confidentiality boundaries between engagements have to be enforced in the tooling, not in policy documents.
- Partner-level autonomy quietly multiplies the number of platforms in use.
- Retention and legal hold obligations apply to systems nobody classified as records systems.
- Clients increasingly send security questionnaires that the firm must answer about its own estate.
Your clients’ auditors are also auditing you
In this sector the security review is not a procurement formality. It arrives from clients whose own regulators require them to assess their advisers. An estate that cannot produce evidence of access control and retention becomes a commercial problem, not just a technical one.
What Ferrafox would take on.
- Identity and access, including confidentiality boundaries enforced in Entra and Microsoft 365
- Integration between practice, document and billing systems
- Client portals built to survive the client’s security review
- Retention, legal hold and the evidence that both are working
Tell us what your organization runs on.
The first conversation is about the environment as it stands today: what exists, what it costs to keep running, and where responsibility currently sits.