Reimagining the Legal Sector with Azure for Holmes O’Malley Sexton LLP

Holmes O’Malley Sexton LLP was founded in 1970 and has grown to be one of the largest law firms in Ireland, with a team of 140 people across their offices in Dublin, Limerick, Cork and London.

In 2016, the firm underwent a period of strategic renewal which accelerated their growth, enabling the firm to expand their services and client base. Under the Holmes O’Malley Sexton LLP name, there are two brands: HOLMES and HOMS Assist. HOMS Assist provides services to private clients and individuals and HOLMES provides services to the corporate and public sector. Within the firm, its team operates in two very different markets and provides very different services to those clients. However, common across the firm is a commitment to provide a premium quality service to their clients.

For Holmes O’Malley Sexton LLP, delivering the best possible service to their clients while enabling their teams to work securely and collaboratively is core to their decision-making process when it comes to investment in technology.

With this in mind, the IT team at Holmes O’Malley Sexton LLP began to seek ways in which they could deliver on the above, while ensuring that the very important client data they manage could be kept completely secure. Having ActionPoint as their trusted IT partner, the IT team explored the potential of their cloud journey, its benefits and how it would revolutionise how the team worked. Working with ActionPoint, Holmes O’Malley Sexton LLP underwent their seamless journey to the Azure Cloud.  

Keeping their people at the heart of everything they do, the team at Holmes O’Malley Sexton LLP were passionate about providing a safe, secure and collaborative platform for their 140 strong team. The move to Azure Cloud has allowed their teams to excel in their work in many ways, such as:  

• Security: Up until the investment in Azure, all valuable client data was inseparably tied to the office servers and back up servers. If their local hardware experienced a problem, it could have taken several hours/days or weeks to restore the data from the back up servers. Having looked at their business continuity plan and disaster recovery plans, they realised that there was viable risk to the firm of losing data be it through, cyber threats, viral infections, age-related hardware deterioration, or simple user error.  With client data the number one priority for the business, Holmes O’Malley Sexton LLP were not in the business of taking risks at their client’s expense. Since moving to the cloud, all the firm’s information remains safe and easily accessible to staff.  
• Collaboration: Team members can view and share information easily and securely across the platform.  It even provides collaborative social spaces to connect employees across the organisation. Collaboration was possible before migrating to Azure but was not as easy or effective. 
• Flexibility: The cloud offers the firm more overall flexibility versus hosting on a local server.  This improved freedom and flexibility has made a significant difference to the overall efficiency of the firm, allowing them to meet business demands quickly.

You can learn more about Holmes O’Malley Sexton LLP and their cloud migration journey, here.