An Open-and-Shut Case for Managed Print Services in Your Law Firm

Many organizations talk about the importance of the productivity of employees, but few are more sensitive to it than law firms. For law firms, if the printers or copiers are down, that means lawyers and paralegals are not being productive. Many of these firms can tell you down to the dollar-per-minute what failed productivity is costing them.

At Marco, we understand that having a print environment that is extremely reliable is important to law firms. Marco’s managed print services (MPS) is a way to manage all your printers and copiers and minimize the downtime of the system. With a lot of service companies, you have to take their word for it if they say they have the best service.

At Marco we prefer a more evidentiary approach to describing our service...

Exhibit A: Our scorecard

We put our service statistics on a scorecard and publish them for transparency. We think they tell an important story. For example, the print services industry publishes response times - and we do too - but we also publish time to resolution. Our technicians can get to your site quickly, but when they get there, they bring with them the parts and expertise to get your system back up and running in the shortest possible time. That’s why we hold ourselves to a higher standard: time to resolution.

The way we see it, anyone can respond fast and send a technician to diagnose your print problems. But if they don’t actually reduce your downtime, it doesn’t answer your concerns as a customer. That’s why we prefer to focus on our time to resolution. We think that tells a more complete story about our service.

Exhibit B: The Association of Legal Administrators

In an effort to better understand law firms, we have been partnering and sponsoring events with the Association of Legal Administrators (ALA) for years. It has taught us a great deal about the high pressure, high touch environment existing in most law firms. We are grateful to have been welcomed into the tight-knit community of law firms.

One of our successes with managed print services in a large law firm environment was with the national firm Dorsey & Whitney LLP.

Exhibit C: Partnership with your IT Department

Marco can respond and resolve issues quickly when your printer goes down, but our partnership with your firm’s IT team is vital. Our work with your IT department can help us set up contingencies and back up equipment to maintain critical up-time. 

In one law firm, we got a crash course in Microsoft Word macros from their IT department. They had an elaborate system of macros built into all of their documents that gave very explicit instructions to the printers about how each print needed to be handled - right down to the correct paper tray and letterhead. That team provided the specs and communicated the importance of these macros to the workflow of the law firm. In many ways, even if we exceed our own standards of service, that's not enough - the customer’s experience is always the most important measure.

Law firms are serious places, and Marco has responded to the industry with our continual efforts to become experts and a trusted partner. We understand the legal environment and the expectations placed on the IT department. But we don’t just say it; we can prove it.