Harold Stock and Co.
With four offices spread across in Mossley, Failsworth and Stockport, Harold Stock & Co. Solicitors have been providing legal services for over 30 years in and around Lancashire and Cheshire. As a practice, they provide a full spectrum of legal advice from conveyancing and personal injury to family and commercial law.
Harold Stock’s Director, Darren McGuinness recalls that ‘before Probado, our IT system wasn’t the best, we ran our own server from our Failsworth office which relied on a WIFI network with a taped back-up. This left us vulnerable, with no reliable means of disaster recovery when complying with solicitor regulations.’
Darren continues ‘I found Probado’s approach refreshing and personable. Probado clearly know their subject, they are easy to talk to, with no jargon and provide great customer service. They think about future proofing when choosing the right system – not just choosing for the now.’
“I travel between offices and its massively improved my workflow being able to hot desk and login remotely.”
The Right Solution
Having initially been commissioned for off-site backup services, Probado were then asked to create a unification strategy for all sites and a road map for its delivery. This involved structured cabling and creating a network between offices, as well as a terminal server off-site at Probado’s secure Datacenter for resilience. A second off-site data server was then put in place for back-up and email achieving.
Within all Harold Stock offices, PCs were migrated to Thin Clients which reduced the cost of ownership, increased security with a three tier level of Antivirus protection. Practice Manager, Alex Newman commented about the network connectivity ‘I travel between offices and its massively improved my workflow being able to hot desk and login remotely’.
SpeechExec
As part of the IT system review, Harold Stock & Co. were also migrated from the PC Edition to the server led SpeechExec Enterprise, providing they with greater flexibility when it came to encrypted digital dictation. Darren comments ‘I was in Leicester and had to take a statement, with SpeechExec I was able to send the digitally recorded statement to my secretary to type and within 20 minutes she was able to document the statement and send out a letter to my client.’
Alex also commented ‘SpeechExec has also allowed me to manage the workflow of secretaries, so it doesn’t matter if they are in different offices, three secretaries can all work on the same case all at once.’
A Helping Hand
Probado’s Helpdesk also provide technical support to Harold Stock, Alex continues ‘We use Probado’s Helpdesk a lot and I like the fact you can look back at your service history and see things have been dealt with.’ Darren concludes ‘I find the Helpdesk are always very polite and they get information to you very quickly and efficiently.’
