Innovative digital workplace gives Holla Advocaten the foundation for further growth

The request: professionalisation and growing pains

“Holla is essentially underpinned by two fundamental elements”, explains Vastenburg. “Our legal specialists with their knowledge, experience and skills form the first. Data is the second. Our IT landscape is the key link between these two elements. It’s therefore essential that our IT systems run smoothly. Sharing information, researching data and digital communications are at the heart of our operations.”

“As our firm has grown in recent years, so have our IT needs, demands and capabilities. We wanted to be able to access the same digital facilities as the largest professional service providers in the Netherlands. That’s why we’ve constantly been implementing new, best-ofclass applications in recent years. But as we kept adding new applications and replacing old ones, we hit the limits of our IT landscape.”

Holla set up this landscape together with an IT partner in 2013. “It’s met our needs all this time”, says Vastenburg. “But it ran aground when we tried to take it a step further. Applications seized up, or we couldn’t open files quickly at critical moments. This meant we lost valuable time. We also noticed that our requirements and questions were becoming too complex for our partner at that time. We’d simply outgrown each other, and that’s why we started looking for a partner and a solution that could grow with us.”

The impact: stability, speed and accessibility

The result of this proposal is now in place. Holla has a new, fresh IT infrastructure allowing the office to collaborate and communicate digitally and efficiently. “Thanks to this restructuring, our landscape is now extremely stable”, says Vastenburg. “And our employees have noticed this. Applications work faster, there are no more service outages, and we always have access to our files. Our customers also benefit from this.”

The modernisation actually came just in time, according to Vastenburg. “We went live just before the coronavirus outbreak. So when we suddenly had to work mainly from home, we changed from an office-based organisation into an almost ‘virtual organisation’ within three hours. We would never have been able to do that a few years back. Employees now have well-equipped laptops with cloud access and central support. Among other things, they’re reaping the benefits of Microsoft Office 365, Teams and our document management system iManage.”