SCREEN SAVIOUR

ARTICLE

SCREEN SAVIOUR

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF AN ACCIDENTAL IT GUY

Hi, I’m the Accidental IT Guy. You may know me from such IT solutions as: "Close it down and open it up again"; "log out and log back in again"; sign out and sign back in again"; "turn it off and turn it back on again"; and – if all else fails - "turn it off, leave it for 5 minutes, then turn it back on again".

I had been moderately content in my quiet, uneventful job at a Shropshire law firm. Then one day, I was called in to see the IT Manager and the Managing Partner. They needed someone to fill in on the IT Service Desk immediately. Would I cover that for a few months? So what exactly did your mildmannered, unassuming, humble Legal Document Developer learn when he had his chance at the big-time in the world of IT HelpDesks? What insights did I gain when I moved from being someone who called the HelpDesk to being the one answering the calls? Stay with me and find out....

1. Law is incredibly diverse, so is IT

Not all lawyers are interchangeable. For example, at LB, we have Stephen Scully, who is a great Associate in Crime. BUT… if I was moving house, and Stephen rocked up as my conveyancer, I would be on the phone immediately cancelling the removals van, and tryingto build back bridges with all the neighbours who I told where to go when I thought that I would never have to see them again.

Conversely, were I in the dock, Stephen turning up would be a green light for the stretched limo and champagne.

Likewise, being good in one part of IT (Microsoft Office), does not mean that you have any idea about all the backend stuff. No-one can be a dab hand at Pivot Tables or Word styles, yet also be able to keep all those servers in tip-top running order. Add in mobile devices etc, and you soon realise that, like law, you can have jacks-of-all-trades, but for some things, only a specialist will do. So, unless you have an IT department that runs into the 100s, you cannot expect the IT department to be able to fix everything without some outside help.

2. People don’t contact IT just for a chat

There is plenty of evidence out there that people suffering from loneliness make more GP visits. It is equally obvious that we are not medically qualified and (hopefully) you have more than enough clients to talk to. Of course, when we sit in IT, it is blindingly obvious when people have called with something trivial, and equally, there are those who have sat on a serious issue for ages, and you wish that they had mentioned it at the very start, and saved everyone a lot of grief. Irrespective of this, the one constant is that solicitors and their staff only ever call when they don’t feel that they have any other option. By this stage, the best-case scenario is that they are just frustrated. Worst case is that they are frustrated and stressed because they have a deadline to meet in the next 10 minutes. I soon figured out that not treating every caller as a complete idiot made me a lot of friends very quickly.

3. Lawyers really benefit from being nice

I hate to break it to you, but I can bet my bottom dollar that you are not Lady Hale in disguise. I do not doubt your legal prowess, but in reality you make a living as much from the fact that you are pleasant and courteous to your clients as from what your learnt at law school. So, if you can be pleasant enough to a paying client, you are capable of being courteous to the HelpDesk. A normal human would find it impossible to be horrid to people who were nice to them, and subconsciously will go the extra mile to help. Cordial relations with the HelpDesk may not be in the job description, but making a little bit of an effort, will make life a whole lot less unpleasant.

4. Belittling people is counter-productive

Just a corollary of the two previous points. But tempting as it may be at times, is that transient feeling of superiority really worth the ill-feeling that will linger until one party leaves the firm? Obviously this works both ways, so if anyone has ever felt that I have been sneery, then I would truly want to say that it would be entirely unintentional, and I would only be hurting myself. As the Daddy Balloon said to his son: “you've let me down, you've let your mum down, but most of all you've let yourself down.”

5. We are incredibly lucky to have an in-house IT Help Desk

Not all firms can hit a sweet-spot – size-wise – where it is viable to have an in-house IT HelpDesk. It is not just the immediacy of the support and being able to walk down a corridor to sort out a problem in person, the big benefit is that we all have a common purpose – if some malware takes down the firm, it’s not just the solicitors that go down, the IT department go down with them. There is a far stronger imperative to work collaboratively.

6. I marvel everyday at how much IT actually works

Growing up at a time when computers were programmed using punch cards, I could not have imagined just how much computers would worm their way into every aspect of our lives. To make all these things work together requires a series of background steps to be followed that I now realise look positively Byzantine compared to a County Court trial. It’s only when one small part go awry that you realize just how vital it is to the whole system.

And it’s not just hardware failing, I always imagine that all these different programs will talk to each other in the same computer language, but will each have their own idiosyncrasies (viz. you say potato, I say potato). So, when I think about how many times each and every one of us logs on, and everything aligns, the question should be “why do my emails arrive in my Inbox?” rather than “why hasn’t this emailed arrived yet?”.

Put another way, if the rate of dubious court decisions was as low as the failure rate in your IT system, the justice system would be cock-a-hoop.

7. Cyberattacks are only too real

Of course, this is merely stating the obvious that all of us know. So why bring it up yet again? If you are like me, you have to downplay the threat of cyberattacks in your own mind if not we would all become paralysed by paranoia. “Surely these things happen to other people, but not to little, insignificant me?”. Sadly, just 10 minutes checking the firm’s email filters soon disavowed me of that notion. And it wasn’t just the scale, it was the severity of the attacks that is so alarming. For the avoidance of doubt, some of these attacks have the potential to lead onto existential threats to your firm, and by extension the livelihoods of you and your colleagues. Undoubtedly, a law firm is big enough to present itself as tempting target for hackers. Remember when your teacher used to admonish you with “you wouldn't do that in front of your parents”. Well, the opposite applies here, do whatever you want at home, just don’t do it on your firm’s IT system.

8. Who are the real heroes?

Saves your life & Saves your file

Mike Lim

Mike Lim is a Legal Document Developer/IT Saviour at Lanyon Bowdler solicitors