When should a law firm hire in-house IT?

Most firms over 100 fee-earners benefit from at least one in-house IT person, typically as an IT manager working alongside a managed-IT firm. Firms over 250 fee-earners may justify a full in-house team. Below 80 fee-earners, in-house IT is usually more expensive and less effective than managed IT.

How much does an in-house IT manager cost?

For a law firm in London or the Home Counties, expect £55,000 to £75,000 per year fully loaded (salary + employer NI + pension + benefits) for a capable IT manager. A junior IT support role lands at £30,000 to £40,000 fully loaded.

Can in-house IT and managed IT coexist?

Yes — and for firms over 80-100 fee-earners, this is usually the right model. The in-house person handles day-to-day user support and acts as the internal IT voice; the managed-IT firm provides infrastructure, security, vCIO strategy, and 24×7 monitoring.

Techsperience vs in-house IT: when does hiring make sense?

The “should we hire in-house or use a managed-IT firm?” question is asked a lot, and most answers are either self-serving (managed-IT firms saying “use us”) or romanticised (firms imagining a single brilliant IT manager who’ll solve everything). Neither is right.

This article gives the honest comparison, including the cases where we’d tell a firm to hire internally rather than work with us.

What a managed-IT firm gives you

A reputable managed-IT firm gives you:

A team of people, with overlapping skills, available across business hours and on-call out-of-hours
24×7 Security Operations Centre cover (almost impossible to replicate in-house under 200 staff)
Tools and platforms that wouldn’t be cost-effective for a single firm (RMM, MDR, ticketing, audit tooling, vCIO software)
A vCIO presence at the partners’ table
Continuous Technology Alignment review against industry standards
Compliance posture (Cyber Essentials, ISO 27001 alignment, SRA expectations) baked in
Continuity when individuals are on holiday or leave

The headline cost for a UK law firm is £100 to £150 per user per month, plus software licences and hardware.

What an in-house IT person gives you

A full-time IT manager gives you:

Someone who works for your firm, in your office, with your culture
Deep familiarity with your specific environment, software stack, and people
Same-day responsiveness on minor issues — fee-earners can walk over to the IT desk
A single internal voice for IT decisions
Capacity for project work without separate quotes

The headline cost for a UK law firm in London or the Home Counties is £55,000 to £75,000 fully loaded for a capable IT manager. A junior support hire is £30,000 to £40,000.

Where managed IT wins

For firms under approximately 80 staff:

You can’t afford the redundancy. A single IT manager goes on holiday. Gets ill. Quits with two weeks’ notice. Your firm depends on technology — you cannot have one person be the single point of failure for it.
You can’t justify the toolset. The tools a managed-IT firm uses (security operations platform, MDR, vCIO software, network monitoring, backup-and-restore at scale) cost more per year than a junior IT salary. Multi-tenanted across many firms, the unit cost is reasonable. Single-tenanted, it isn’t.
You’d have to pick a generalist. Below 80 staff, you can hire one person. That person will be a competent generalist — they will not be a deep specialist in security, networking, M365 administration, and practice-management integration. A managed-IT firm has each of those people.
Compliance posture is hard to maintain. Cyber Essentials, ISO 27001, SRA expectations — these need continuous attention by people who do them across many environments. A solo in-house manager will let some slip; not from incompetence, just from bandwidth.

Where in-house wins

For firms over approximately 250 staff:

The economics flip. At 250 staff, the marginal cost of additional managed-IT users exceeds what an in-house team would cost. You can hire two or three people for what 250 users at £125/month per user buys you.
Internal politics matter more. A 250-person firm has internal coalitions, change-resistant fee-earners, and entrenched ways of working. An external IT firm has limited authority to push through change. An internal CIO has more.
Specialist roles become viable. At 250 staff you can justify a security specialist, a M365 administrator, an applications person, and an IT manager. Below that, you’re hoping one person does all four.

The middle ground: 80-250 staff

Most firms in this range benefit from both. The right model is usually:

One in-house IT person — typically titled IT Manager — handling day-to-day user support, internal advocacy, and project coordination.
A managed-IT firm providing infrastructure operations, security operations centre cover, vCIO strategy, and continuous alignment review.

The in-house person is the firm’s voice; the managed-IT firm is the depth and the cover. The two together are meaningfully better than either alone, at this size.

For Techsperience clients in this range, we work alongside the in-house IT manager rather than around them. The vCIO sessions are joint sessions. The alignment review surfaces gaps the in-house person can prioritise. The 24×7 SOC means the in-house person can take a holiday.

When we’d tell a firm to hire instead

The honest answer:

You’re growing past 250 staff and don’t have an internal IT lead yet. Hire one. We’ll be the team that sits behind them.
You have a specific compliance overlay we don’t have depth in. If your firm has a regulatory profile that needs daily, deep specialist attention — not just SRA-grade controls — an in-house specialist is the right answer.
You’ve had a managed-IT relationship that didn’t work, and the diagnosis is fundamentally cultural. Sometimes the answer is “we need someone in our office, on our payroll, in our culture.” A managed-IT firm cannot replace that, however good.

If any of those describe your situation, we’d say so on the 10-minute call. We’d rather not start a relationship that ends in eighteen months because the underlying need was different.

How to think about the decision

Two questions, in order:

Below 80 staff? Managed IT is the right default. Solo in-house hire is almost always the wrong call.
80 to 250 staff? Managed IT plus one in-house person is the right default. Pure in-house is fragile; pure managed-IT misses internal advocacy.
Over 250 staff? Internal team plus managed-IT for specialist depth (SOC, vCIO, peer benchmarking) is increasingly common. Pure managed-IT is unusual at this size; pure in-house leaves specialist gaps.

The wrong decision is rarely the choice of model. It’s underestimating the level of investment required, then trying to make whichever model you picked work on a 70%-of-needed budget.