case study · legal
A 42-attorney regional firm was running on a tangled mix of on-prem Exchange, three different file shares, and a Wi-Fi network that had been added to one access point at a time over a decade. We rebuilt the network from the rack outward, migrated to Microsoft 365, and consolidated the file shares into a single SharePoint structure — all over three weekends, with the firm continuing to bill normal hours throughout.
regional law firm · Dane County · 2025
01
The on-prem Exchange server was 11 years old. Mailboxes were over quota; the IT volunteer (a managing partner) was deleting calendar history weekly to keep things running. Wi-Fi coverage in one corner of the office required a roaming attorney to walk to the kitchen to send an attachment. The firm needed to keep billing normal hours through the fix — there was no allowance for downtime.
02
We replaced the rack over a Saturday: managed switch, redundant gateway, eight access points covering the office floor with one in the kitchen and one in each satellite. We ran the new network in parallel with the old for two weeks while attorneys self-migrated their devices. By the second weekend, no one was on the legacy switches.
03
Office 365 tenant provisioned, then a staged migration of mailboxes in batches of seven, each over a Friday-Saturday-Sunday cycle. We kept the Exchange server live as a fallback for the first month after the last batch moved. Every attorney had two-factor enabled before their mailbox cut over. Recovery codes were generated, printed, and physically distributed at signing.
04
Three file shares with overlapping copies of every matter folder collapsed into a SharePoint structure mapped to the firm's matter-numbering convention. We wrote a small migration tool that preserved every file's last-modified date so the firm's record-retention policy didn't reset. One paralegal sat with us for the migration weekend to validate that every active matter was findable.
05 / outcomes
The numbers we held ourselves to. Reviewed quarterly with the client.
06 / next
if it shipped, we owned it. start to finish.
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