How much should a law firm spend on IT per user?

For a UK private-practice law firm with managed IT, expect to spend £100 to £150 per user per month on managed services, plus an additional £50 to £80 per user per month on Microsoft 365 licensing and core software. Total ongoing spend lands at £150 to £230 per user per month, excluding hardware refresh and one-off projects.

What does Microsoft 365 cost for a law firm?

Most UK law firms use Microsoft 365 Business Premium (£18.10 per user per month, ex VAT) or Office 365 E3 / E5 for larger firms. Add Intune, Azure AD Premium, and Defender for Business as needed. Expect £20 to £45 per user per month for Microsoft licensing alone.

Are managed IT contracts cheaper than hiring in-house?

For firms under approximately 80 staff, managed IT is usually meaningfully cheaper than hiring in-house. A capable in-house IT manager costs £55,000 to £75,000 per year fully loaded; a managed-IT contract for the same firm typically lands at £40,000 to £80,000 per year — and includes 24×7 monitoring, vCIO time, and tools no in-house hire could justify.

Should hardware be included in IT pricing?

Generally no. Most managed-IT contracts price the service per user per month and quote hardware separately at supplier list price (or modestly above). Mixing them tends to obscure both lines.

What should IT cost per user in a law firm?

This is one of the most-searched questions in legal-IT, and most answers are unhelpful. They’re either vendor-marketing pieces (“call us for a quote!”) or industry surveys averaging across firms of wildly different sizes and risk profiles. This article gives the honest answer with real numbers — and the reasons the range is as wide as it is.

The headline numbers

For a UK private-practice law firm using managed IT:

Managed-IT services: £100 to £150 per user per month
Microsoft 365 licensing: £20 to £45 per user per month (depending on plan)
Practice-management software: £30 to £60 per user per month (varies enormously by vendor)
Other software (e-signature, dictation, e-discovery, comms): £10 to £30 per user per month

Total ongoing spend: £160 to £285 per user per month.

That doesn’t include hardware refresh (typically £30 to £50 per user per month if you amortise a 3-to-4-year laptop refresh), one-off project work (office moves, migrations, upgrades), or the costs of doing it badly (outages, breaches, missed audits).

For a 50-person firm, £160 to £285 per user per month works out to £96,000 to £171,000 per year. For 100 people, it’s £192,000 to £342,000.

Why the range is wide

Three factors drive most of the variance:

01. Cybersecurity intensity. Firms handling high-value M&A work, family law for high-net-worth clients, or large client-money flows have stricter security needs than a high-street commercial practice. The latter sits at £100/user/month for managed services; the former sits at £150.

02. Software stack complexity. A clean Microsoft 365 firm with one practice-management system and a document store is cheap to run. A firm with three legacy applications, two case-management systems from a recent merger, and a dictation workflow that hasn’t been touched in eight years isn’t.

03. Working pattern. A single-office firm where everyone works on-premises four days a week is simpler than a firm with a London HQ, two regional offices, frequent court appearances, and partners working from country homes. The technology has to follow the people; that costs more to do well.

How to benchmark your current spend

Most firms can’t easily produce a per-user IT spend figure. Costs are spread across managed-services contracts, Microsoft licences, individual software subscriptions, hardware refresh budgets, and ad-hoc consulting. To benchmark properly:

Add up everything. Managed services. All software licences. All hardware bought in the last three years (divided by three for an annualised figure). All consulting and project work. All cyber-insurance premiums. Anything labelled “IT” in the P&L.
Divide by your average headcount over that period. Use fee-earners + support staff combined, not just fee-earners.
Compare to the ranges above. If you’re significantly below £160/user/month all-in, you’re likely under-investing — particularly in security or strategic IT. If you’re significantly above £285/user/month, you may have technical-debt accumulation, vendor sprawl, or over-engineered infrastructure.

When the cheap answer isn’t actually cheap

The most common pattern we see in firms that have under-invested in IT: a managed-IT contract priced at £60-£80 per user per month with no vCIO time, no continuous alignment review, no SOC monitoring, and a helpdesk that’s actually a four-person team in a shared service handling fifty other clients.

The headline price looks competitive. The total cost of ownership doesn’t, once you factor in:

Outages that could have been prevented
Audit findings that take legal time to remediate
Cyber-insurance premiums that tick up year-on-year because the underwriter sees gaps
Time the senior partner spends acting as an unofficial IT director
Breach risk that would-be acquirers will discount your firm for

The right comparison isn’t “is £60 cheaper than £125 per user per month.” It’s “what does £60-grade IT actually cost the firm by the end of three years.”

Pricing posture: published vs custom-quoted

Most managed-IT firms refuse to publish their pricing. The reasoning given is that “every firm is different” — and there is a grain of truth to that — but the actual reason is that the call where pricing is discussed is also the call where the firm tries to sell you a higher tier than you needed.

Techsperience publishes its range — £100 to £150 per user per month — because we’d rather you know the number before you pick up the phone. If our range is wrong for your firm, fine. Better to find out in two minutes on a website than after a forty-minute call neither of us wanted to have.