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for planning, managing, delivering and securing IT systems for small and medium size businesses. Attorneys and legal rms are among his best clients.
“My rst client was a 20-person law rm. ey’re still a valued client to this day,” Bickmore says. Snap Tech IT has grown and has o ces in Tempe, San Francisco and Atlanta.
One of the rm’s advantages is that they are a SOC 2 Type Two compli- ant organization, which means the rm is audited by a third-party to a well-respected and understood in- dustry security standard. Bickmore is
“We jumped through the hoops, got in there and were able to make heads and tails of it, recover the lost data, and get their systems up and running in the correct way so they are resilient. We put in great disaster recovery systems, some migrations to cloud services, and now they’re very resilient. e rm had simply trusted their current provider and never had asked for evidence of successful backups. ey had never been show reports of things being setup and they had never had anoth- er organization give them a second opinion on the design. Frankly, they didn’t own their own IT and were
unaware of any other IT provider in the Arizona market with this high level of security credentials.
Bickmore notes a fairly com- mon IT challenge that many at- torneys and legal rms unknow- ingly face. “We’ll come in to a law
rm and see that they have prob- lems they didn’t know they had. ey’re working with the IT pro- vider they’ve been working with for many years and nobody has ever asked if the current provider is really keeping up and doing what they say they do. We get in there and nd risk all over the place they simply weren’t aware of. ey were
just trusting their current solution.” He cites the experience of a Scottsdale-based law rm, which was under duress when they called Snap Tech IT. A monsoon storm had knocked out their power and dam- aged some equipment in their server room because they didn’t have good server protection. ey discovered their back up system wasn’t function- ing. Not only was the rm’s computer system and backups not functioning, the rm lost signi cant amounts of
countable. Many attorneys and rms just don’t understand the risks in- volved in what they’re doing. ey can really get themselves into a spot where they have a signi cant outage or data loss that ends up costing them dearly,” Bickmore says.
He says that 90 percent of the rms they assess initially did not have did not have backups functioning the way the clients believed. Almost 40 percent had no functional backup. Usually their provider has sold them one, but it’s not working. e major- ity of them lacked ransomware pro- tection, advanced persistent security threat protection, log aggregation or even threat hunting – all critical services for attorneys and law rms wanting a secure business in the 21st century.
Client education is a major focus for Snap Tech IT. “We are a big fan of teaching law rms in how to hold us accountable in showing them the data in how we’re doing – good or bad – for them. ey have a much clearer vision of what’s going on. We have found that educating the clients helps them making better decisions and that bene ts us as the provider as well as the law rm.”
Bickmore says that his experience shows that law rms are not adopting new technology fast enough, which means they are missing a major com- petitive advantages. He predicts dra- matic change in the way successful law rms will adapt to the new trends in IT.
“I think that in the coming years we’re not going to be selling servers to law rms. We’ll be selling cloud in- frastructure. We’re talking about law rms fundamentally changing their timekeeping, billing, applications, matter management, document stor- age, and so on. It is time to move the technology needle forward into solu- tions that provide rms with a com- petitive advantage. ey should really be looking forward in these areas,” he says.
SNAP TECH IT
1414 W. Broadway Rd., Ste. 105 Tempe, AZ 85282
(844) 949-7627
invaluable data. Bickmore says,
blind to what was going on.”
From Building a Business to Educating Clients
“I nd that attorneys are great at- torneys, but rarely are they good at managing IT. Whether you have a vendor doing it all for you or not, you need to understand more about common IT best practices and what it takes to hold your IT provider ac-
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