Clarkson Wright & Jakes choose Legal Digital Workplace by Oosha

The challenge

Before joining Oosha more than 2 years ago, Clarkson Wright & Jakes was experiencing several fundamental challenges with its IT infrastructure and providers. Their existing on-premise solution didn’t provide the platform they needed to develop a modern IT function - it made remote working more challenging and restricted their ability to migrate from their PMS.

CWJ wanted to ensure they weren't vulnerable to emerging security threats that could target the valuable and sensitive information its users work with day-to-day. But most fundamental to the challenges CWJ was experiencing, was their IT support provider. Although based locally, CWJ’s experience with their legacy IT partner was far from close-working.

The non-specialist provider was a poor cultural fit with CWJ, leading to hesitance from members of staff to contact the help desk - overwhelming internal IT resources as a result. Being a large-scale support company, the team at CWJ also found it difficult to escalate issues to senior people when they needed to, leaving them feeling frustrated when key decisions needed to be made quickly.

The solution

After a lengthy tender process, CWJ joined forces with Oosha in January 2019. The first task was to rebuild their IT infrastructure from scratch, providing them with a more secure, high-performing, and cloud-based foundation on which to host their new practice management system. Oosha’s technical team worked on-site through the two-week implementation stage to iron out any issues and ensure the Digital Workplace was seamlessly launched. And then, one year later, helped them implement the new legal practice management system that was so critical to their operations.

After the initial launch, the team at CWJ was able to access Oosha’s specialist legal IT support desk who have extensive experience dealing with all major legal applications. This was critical to CWJ, particularly after the launch of their new PMS system.

The benefits

The move to the Oosha’s Digital Workplace has given CWJ a solid platform on which to operate effectively, and especially so through the challenges posed by COVID-19. CWJ has been able to adopt remote working with ease and has leveraged Oosha’s expertise to bring in multi-factor authentication for users so that sensitive legal documents can’t be accessed by malicious actors. This has come in conjunction with cyber awareness training, where the Oosha team is helping bring CWJ’s workforce up to speed on how to work safely from home.

“We had a senior member of the Oosha team dedicated to CWJ, and having that single point of contact at the start of the pandemic was really helpful. We now have everyone who needs to work from home doing so, and it’s worked out very well.”
Andrew Wright, Senior Partner at Clarkson Wright & Jakes

Speaking about the partnership, and Oosha’s support at the outbreak of the pandemic, Andrew Wright, Senior Partner at CWJ said: “Not that many of our users were set up for remote working, and Oosha helped us source some laptops very quickly,” The success of the partnership has also delivered benefits that are more than just technological. Highlighting Oosha’s agile, friendly, and personable approach, Andrew adds: “The key reason we chose Oosha was the cultural fit. With Oosha, we felt like we could just pick up the phone and any issues would get sorted. If we ever needed to, we also felt we could escalate issues right to the top of the business.“

The future

In the next stage of CWJ’s partnership with Oosha, their phone system and collaboration tools will be reviewed - with the potential of utilising Microsoft Teams to deliver an all-in-one, cloud-based telephony and collaboration solution.

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