Lawyer Monthly Magazine - September 2021 Edition

44 WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM | SEP 2021 GETTING CONNECTIVITY RIGHT FOR YOUR FIRM The world of work has changed. What started out in the UK (and inmany other countries too) as a blanket work-from-home (WFH) approach due to lockdown, has now morphed into a seemingly moveable feast. There seems to be a different reaction across the spectrum with respect to how people are currently working. Whilst a few still WFH almost exclusively, the majority of people are mixing things up – a combination of a couple of days in the office, some WFH and even a bit of remote working too. The legal sector is no different. We have reached the first anniversary of Linklaters’ announcement to adopt a new global agile working policy that focused on remote working. At the core of the announcement was a drive to empower workers at the firm to establish precisely where they decided to work – no faffing about to get the requisite permission. Many other major law firms adopted a similar stance to working on the basis that remote or agile working did not prevent workers from delivering high-quality work. The practice of having staff WFH at least part of the time looks like it is here to stay. Many people have expressed a desire to continue doing so and many firms continue to be flexible in this respect. What has been key, though, as firms have tried to adapt to the demands of remote working, has been technology. As IT departments up and down the country struggled to deal with the requirements of a largely disparate workforce, legal firms needed the assurance that their people could seamlessly interact with each other and with their clients. This is an essential requirement for any firm if they are to maintain the high standards of service that their clients have come to expect. In essence, the bottom-line requirement is to be able to mirror the experience of working at the office but at home or on the move. Easier said than done, perhaps, as firms need to ensure that their people enjoy secure access to resources whilst also enhancing the end user experience. And as we see firms laying the (technological) foundations for their staff to work successfully from home, how can they ensure that their people are working just as productively as they were before? If the quality or quantity of work output is negatively affected, then the whole experiment is doomed to failure. There is amyriad of security and compliance issues that arise from agile and remote working - IT and security teams need to ensure that their people can connect securely, without sacrificing user experience. And as we have already pointed out, all of this needs to be delivered in such a way that service levels to clients are not compromised in any way at all. Getting Connectivity Right for Your Firm Robert Gibson-Bolton Enterprise Sales Manager Netmotion by Absolute NetMotion Wireless (UK), Fora, Thames Tower, Station Road, Reading, RG1 1LX, United Kingdom Tel: +0 (800) 048 8442 With several major law firms having made the switch to a hybrid working model, it is time for the legal sector to take another look at the technology they have used to equip their staff. We hear from Robert Gibson-Bolton, who shares his thoughts on the issue of connectivity for staff who choose to work from home.