There was a blog post doing the rounds over Easter via twitter about a law firms marketing dept that asked an employee to stop re-tweeting the firms twitter posts made me think twice about writing a post on the brief history of our IT dept. But then I give our marketing team a bit more credit than that, so here goes. A blog post whose sole purpose is just for a bit of light end of week reading.

I include the name the firm as it really doesn’t take more than a few clicks to work out which law firm I work for. And so before you read on you might also want to read my disclaimer, especially if you’re a lawyer just so you’re under no illusions that this is some kind of official blog post 🙂

The IT dept as it stands now had its genesis back in the city of Bradford in West Yorkshire. It was housed in a lovely 1960’s office block (see photos below), a building called Arndale House. At the time the firm was known as Dibb Lupton Broomhead and was still very much a Yorkshire firm rather than the global organisation it is now. At that time there was also an IT presence in the main Sheffield office (a team looking after the network and a couple of Unix boxes, the helpdesk, the training team and the IT director), however it was the smaller team based in Bradford which was the start of what would become the global IT dept (the Bradford team quickly grew in those early days from 3 to approximately 9 people – 5 of whom still work for the firm).

At the time the firm was on a Novell network with the main desktop application being Word Perfect and it only had internal email (although an external AOL account was available from one IT machine!!).

The Bradford team was crammed into 3 small rooms, sharing the floor with the old DMRU teams, before growing slowly to take some open plan space outside these rooms and finally relocating to take half of the floor when it brought in some infrastructure teams and application support (all that was left in Sheffield was the help desk by this time and the firm had merged with Alsop Wilkinson to become the the burgundy national firm Dibb Lupton Alsop)

At this point external email was up and running, Windows 2000 had replaced Novell, the firms intranet was in place (together with a flickering candle for the ‘I’ of iSIS at Christmas time! It was after all when animated GIF’s ruled the web!) and some thoughts on a matter centric DMS for the firm were starting to emerge (if you worked in the the dept at that time then do you remember 80/20? The ideas from which generated the firms home grown matter centric DMS years before WorkSite 8).

Growth for the dept mirrored the firm and by Y2K it had re-camped again to take an entire floor, two below its previous home in Arndale House. A large open plan aircraft hanger of an office now housed all the IT dept (helpdesk, business systems development, technical development and support teams for applications and infrastructure).

There was a relocation of many of the servers running the IT services from Sheffield to two rows of racks in a nice new server room on the same floor as the dept (apart from the dodgy air conditioning which required portable units to be introduced on many occasions. In fact dodgy air conditioning seems to be a recurring theme in all the offices the dept has been located!)

By 2001 the firm had become the blue squared DLA and the IT dept had relocated from Bradford to Leeds, this would enable it to continue to grow to meet the needs of the growing firm and for it to be closer to the firms offices in Leeds centre which were a much larger part of the firm than the operation in Bradford. Park Row House in Leeds centre was the new home (see photos below).

 

It was the first time the dept had had meeting rooms, build and test rooms as well as a purpose built test server set up. The time at Park Row introduced many of the key cornerstones of the firms current environment. It also saw the firm start to grow its international IT hubs to support the non-UK offices.

The switch from rounded DLA through DLA Piper Rudnick  Gray Cary to DLA Piper saw the IT dept out grow Park Row House and move to its present location in Leeds. The main IT dept is still located here but it now has key regional teams in Amsterdam, Hong Kong, Moscow, Vienna and Dubai, as well as a number of IT personal in most offices for local support and training.