Ward Hadaway, a UK Top 100 law firm, just wrapped up two cloud migrations with BigHand, and the timeline is worth noting on its own. The firm moved its Workflow Management system from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud in less than two months, alongside a separate upgrade from its legacy reporting platform to BigHand Business Intelligence 4.0.
Both projects tie into something fairly practical: the firm wants clearer visibility into performance and workflow as it continues growing, without losing the systems its teams already know how to use.
The Business Intelligence move followed what the firm describes as an extended evaluation process before it settled on BigHand’s cloud platform, largely for its self-service dashboards and general usability. That matters for a law firm specifically, since timekeepers and finance teams need trusted numbers in front of them before anyone makes a decision, not reports that show up too late to inform anything.
The Workflow Management migration is arguably the more interesting piece, mostly because of how the firm approached it. Rather than rebuilding processes from scratch, Ward Hadaway recreated its existing dictation structure inside the new cloud environment, which kept the day-to-day experience familiar for staff while still unlocking better reporting around workload demand, capacity, and task tracking.
Jonathan Smith, the firm’s Director of IT and Facilities, described the collaboration with BigHand across both projects as closely coordinated, framing the work as less about swapping tools and more about building a technology foundation that can actually support the firm as it scales.
Together, the two systems now give Ward Hadaway a more joined-up picture of how the business runs. Business Intelligence covers the financial side, while Workflow Management tracks how work actually moves through the firm day to day, and combining both gives leadership a fuller view than either system could offer on its own.
Pulling off both migrations within a relatively tight window says something about how the team managed the project internally, and it points to a broader pattern across professional services: firms increasingly treating cloud infrastructure not as a one-off IT upgrade, but as an ongoing part of how they plan for growth.
