NetMotion: Best practices in legal IT – Daniel Demonakis from Linklaters
With so many employees working away from the office these days, law firms and the IT teams that support them are under enormous pressure to maintain the security of user devices without compromising access to the data and applications needed by those users. Not only are these endpoints now being used outside the traditional safety of the office environment, but there has also been an upward trend in the amount of proprietary and sensitive data being stored locally on these devices.
Return-to-the-office is now work-from-anywhere
As ‘return to the office’ dates continue to slip – and more organisations realise that the future of work involves much more mobility, these IT teams are shifting gears to accommodate new visibility tools for themselves, and new technology stacks that will help employees stay secure and productive.
One such firm is Linklaters. This global law firm operates across many geographies, with 31 offices serving an incredible range of professional services that run across sectors as diverse as automotive, consumer and energy all the way to mining, sports and telecoms.
The company prides itself on its ability to deliver exceptional client services through that global footprint, helping to foster long-lasting relationships. Central to that success has been a unique culture in which Linklaters’ employees work cohesively as a team, with a common focus on innovation, efficiency and agility.
Embracing mobility
Now, because meetings and team collaboration are done primarily from remote locations, the entire organisation must rely even more heavily on the technology solutions provided by IT. This is a challenge that the global head of devices, data and application services at Linklaters, Daniel Demonakis, has embraced.
“It’s going to be a different world when we get to go back into the office,” said Daniel Demonakis, Global Head of Devices, Data & Application Services, Linklaters.
“There are a whole set of new challenges around efficiencies when you’ve got a workforce that is even more dispersed than it was before,” Demonakis explained. “It means that you have to look at things like office intelligence and other automation activities to try and make daily churn processes go faster and more efficiently, with less lawyer time. That lets the lawyers focus on the skill sets and the value that they bring to the business rather than doing the more remedial tasks that could be done by a computer. There’s a lot of repeatable processes that happen within a law firm, and we’re trying to do stuff that will bring much more innovation into our practices.”
A changed world
“The world has changed,” he continued. “That different working pattern is now here to stay, so we have to think about what we’re going to do to make it easier for people to work in those different environments. Linklaters is looking into things like more cloud distribution points and a better VPN than we’ve traditionally had. We’ve been changing the way we do deployments and making a lot of changes in technology.”
In closing, Demonakis took a long-term view of his own career to provide some recommendations for anyone looking for a place in IT.
“If I think back to my early career, the advice I would give is to keep learning, and not just your own area. Yes, become an expert in that first, but then start learning the wider picture as well. In addition to that, I would say to be curious. Go and talk to people and find out how something works or why something is done a certain way. Then ask yourself if there’s a better way, see what’s happening in the industry and bring those ideas back to whoever you’re working for. Your CV should never be a list of roles or responsibilities that you did at that job; it should be about the extra value you brought to that place where you worked at that time.”
