Your associates are billing $250 an hour while waiting for a laptop to restart. Your senior partner just lost two hours of work because the VPN dropped during a client presentation. And somewhere, your IT budget line item shows you spent $3,200 on new office chairs last month but denied the request for better collaboration tools because “we need to watch expenses.”
Nobody wants to say it out loud in partner meetings, but everyone’s thinking it: the way professional services firms budget for technology makes absolutely no sense.
The Fundamental Problem With How Law Firms, Accounting Firms, and Consultancies Think About IT
Professional services firms are really good at calculating the cost of billable hours. They know exactly what it costs when an associate is unproductive, when a partner can’t access files remotely, or when client deliverables get delayed. They measure utilization rates down to six-minute increments.
But somehow, when it comes to technology spending, all that financial discipline goes out the window. IT gets treated like overhead to be minimized rather than infrastructure that directly enables revenue generation.
The math is simple, but most firms don’t do it. If your average billing rate is $200 per hour and your technology is causing each person to lose just 30 minutes of productivity per week, that’s $100 per person per week in lost billable time. For a 50-person firm, that’s $260,000 annually in unrealized revenue.
Yet these same firms will spend three partner meetings debating whether to spend $15,000 on better IT solutions for professional services that would eliminate most of those productivity losses.
Where Professional Services IT Budgets Actually Go Wrong
Let’s look at how most firms actually allocate their technology spending:
Heavy Investment in the Wrong Things
- Fancy conference room systems that clients see twice a year
- Individual software licenses that never get properly deployed
- Hardware refreshes based on age rather than performance needs
- Redundant systems because nobody’s coordinating purchases
Chronic Underinvestment in Critical Infrastructure
- Client portals that look like they’re from 2008
- Document management systems that make sharing files harder, not easier
- Backup solutions that have never been tested for actual recovery
- Security tools that don’t integrate with anything else
The disconnect is obvious to anyone who actually uses the technology daily. But budget decisions get made by people who mostly interact with clients, not with the firm’s technology infrastructure.
The Real Cost of “Good Enough” Technology
There’s this prevailing attitude in a lot of professional services firms that technology just needs to be “good enough.” As long as people can bill hours and send emails, everything else is negotiable.
But good enough IT creates costs that never show up in the technology budget:
Lost Client Confidence
When your client portal times out during uploads, when video calls constantly have technical issues, or when you can’t quickly access case files during a meeting, clients notice. They’re comparing you to firms that have their technology together, and you’re losing that comparison before you even get to demonstrate your expertise.
Associate Retention Problems
Young professionals coming into law firms, accounting practices, and consulting companies have expectations shaped by consumer technology. When your firm’s IT experience is worse than what they deal with in their personal life, it signals that you don’t value efficiency or their time.
Partner Productivity Drain
Partners end up spending time on work that shouldn’t require partner-level attention—tracking down files, troubleshooting technical issues, manually compiling data that should be automatically aggregated. That’s not just inefficient; it’s expensive at partner billing rates.
Competitive Disadvantage
Your competitors who’ve invested properly in IT solutions for professional services can respond to clients faster, work more efficiently, and scale their operations without proportionally scaling headcount. You’re competing with one hand tied behind your back.
The “We’ll Hire Someone” Trap
When professional services firms finally acknowledge their IT problems, the default response is usually to hire an IT person. Someone to “handle the technology” so partners can focus on client work.
This almost never goes well, for a few reasons:
First, one person can’t possibly handle everything a professional services firm needs from their technology—from strategic planning to help desk support to security management to vendor coordination. You end up with someone who’s perpetually overwhelmed and constantly in reactive mode.
Second, professional services firms typically don’t know how to manage IT staff. They hire someone, hand them a vague mandate to “make the technology better,” provide minimal budget, and then wonder why nothing changes.
Third, good IT talent is expensive and hard to retain. The compensation models that work for associates and partners don’t translate well to technology roles, and you’re competing for talent with companies where IT is the core business.
A lot of firms eventually realize they need a different approach—usually after their internal IT hire leaves frustrated and the partners are back to not understanding why their email isn’t working.
What Smarter Firms Are Doing Differently
The professional services firms that have figured this out aren’t necessarily spending more on technology. They’re spending strategically and measuring ROI differently.
They Budget Based on Productivity Impact
Instead of asking “what does this cost?” they ask “what does this enable?” If better collaboration tools save each person an hour per week, that’s quantifiable value in billable time recovered.
They Invest in User Experience
Client portals that are actually pleasant to use. File systems that people can navigate intuitively. Mobile access that works reliably. These aren’t luxuries—they’re competitive necessities.
They Treat Security as Infrastructure, Not Insurance
Proper security isn’t about passing audits; it’s about protecting client relationships and firm reputation. One data breach can cost more than a decade of proper security investment.
They Recognize When to Outsource
Rather than hiring one overwhelmed IT person, they’re engaging with providers who specialize in IT solutions for professional services and can provide comprehensive support at multiple levels—strategic, tactical, and operational.
They Involve Users in Technology Decisions
The partners making budget decisions actually talk to the associates and staff who use the technology daily. They understand where friction exists and what improvements would have the biggest impact.
The Conversation That Needs to Happen in Your Next Partner Meeting
Someone needs to put this on the agenda: “Are we losing more money to bad technology than we’d spend to fix it?”
Run the numbers honestly. Calculate the real cost of:
- Time lost to technical problems and workarounds
- Client opportunities that went to firms with better technology
- Associates who left partly because the firm’s technology frustrated them
- Data and security risks you’re carrying because spending on proper protection felt optional
Then compare that to what it would actually cost to build a proper technology foundation—not gold-plated, just competent and strategic.
For most professional services firms, the math is striking. You’re probably losing multiples of what you’d need to invest to fix it.
Why This Keeps Not Getting Fixed
The reason this problem persists isn’t that partners are bad at math or don’t understand technology’s importance. It’s that IT improvements rarely have a champion with decision-making authority who personally feels the pain of bad technology.
Partners interact with clients and work on high-level strategic issues. They’re somewhat insulated from the daily frustrations of clunky systems and inefficient workflows. The people who feel those problems most acutely—associates, paralegals, administrative staff—don’t control the budget.
So technology spending stays in the “necessary evil” category, minimized wherever possible, until a crisis forces attention to it. Usually a security incident, a failed audit, or a key client who threatens to leave because your firm’s technology capabilities don’t match their expectations.
The firms getting this right are the ones who’ve had a partner say “this is ridiculous, we need to fix it” and actually follow through with appropriate resources and authority. Once that happens, the improvements compound quickly.
But it starts with admitting that your current IT budget allocation probably doesn’t make sense, even if it’s how you’ve always done it. That’s a harder conversation than debating line items, but it’s the one that actually matters.