Case study
Known as the Law Firm with a passion for people, HCR Law is a top 60 UK law firm. Delivering expert legal services to businesses, organisations, and individuals across the country.
Known as the Law Firm with a passion for people, HCR Law is a top 60 UK law firm. Delivering expert legal services to businesses, organisations, and individuals across the country.
With a strong reputation for excellence and a number of industry awards, such as Law Firm of the Year at Cambridgeshire Law Society Awards, HCR Law combines commercial insight with deep legal expertise.
The firm is trusted by clients not only to help them stay legally compliant but also to guide them through key decisions, whether that’s managing complex business transactions or protecting personal wealth.
Following HCR Law’s acquisition of Hewitsons, the firm faced a significant challenge: consolidating both organisations’ IT environments into a single, secure Microsoft 365 Tenant.
This meant migrating users, emails, documents, and collaboration tools from the legacy tenant into HCR Law’s existing environment, without disrupting ongoing legal work.
The process was made more complex by the variety of systems in use, including hybrid email setups, existing Citrix environments, and on-premises identity systems.
The migration required careful planning to avoid any issues with user logins, access permissions, or critical legal software.
Valto was engaged to manage the full Microsoft 365 tenant migration for HCR Law, ensuring that all systems and users from the former Hewitsons firm were successfully integrated into HCR’s main Microsoft 365 Tenant.
We began with a comprehensive discovery and planning phase, conducting workshops to understand the existing setup, identify potential risks, and define a clear cutover strategy.
Working alongside a partner organisation who managed UPN changes and on-premises account matching, we managed all elements of identity matching and account preparation to ensure a smooth transition.
This included aligning user login details and adapting policies to avoid conflicts.
The migration itself involved moving hundreds of mailboxes, including over 40 very large ones, alongside all relevant SharePoint data, Teams conversations, group structures, and distribution lists.
We dismantled the old hybrid email system as part of the process, while ensuring that any changes made to the firm’s virtual desktop environment were handled carefully to maintain business continuity.
The project successfully brought together two large IT environments into one unified Microsoft 365 tenant, providing HCR Law with greater control, security, and consistency across the firm. In total, we migrated 462 mailboxes (totalling 2.7TB of data), 31 SharePoint sites, and 28 Microsoft Teams, all without causing disruption to users or critical legal systems. The move has simplified IT management for the firm, reduced administrative overhead, and enhanced security with unified policies and better governance across the business. Employees now benefit from a more streamlined experience with improved access to shared resources and collaboration tools. With the new environment in place, HCR Law is well positioned to continue growing and integrating future acquisitions, confident that their digital systems can scale and adapt to meet the evolving needs of the firm and its clients. Benefits:
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