IT for firms
where billable hours matter.
Accounting, consulting, engineering, and architecture firms. Document management, time-tracking integrations, client confidentiality, and the kind of uptime that protects billable hours. Plus engagement-letter-friendly security posture.
Built for the realities of the work.
The things you actually care about, baked into how we run your IT.
Document Management.
iManage, NetDocuments, SharePoint, and CCH Axcess. Set up so retrieval is fast and audit is easy.
Time & Billing.
Sage, BillQuick, enterprise RMM platform, and CCH. Integrations that don't break.
Confidentiality.
Client matter segmentation, encryption, and access discipline. Engagement-letter-friendly.
Travel & Mobility.
Senior staff travel. Secure remote access, encrypted laptops, MFA everywhere.
The stack we deploy in this sector.
Most sites end up with a similar mix. Yours might differ. We tune it.
Managed IT.
Flat-rate, per-user, per-month. Helpdesk, patching, security, and reporting under one invoice.
Managed IT →Cybersecurity.
EDR, MFA, phishing training, dark web monitoring, and managed detection and response.
Cybersecurity →Cloud & Microsoft 365.
Tenant security baselines, mailbox migration, SharePoint hygiene, and Teams that actually works.
Cloud & Infra →Compliance support.
PIPEDA, CASL, and sector-specific privacy alignment. Cyber insurance questionnaires done right.
Compliance →The IT problems this sector runs into.
These come up in almost every conversation we have with professional services firms. They are solvable.
Client information under a duty of care.
Accountants, lawyers, engineers and consultants all hold information their clients expect to be protected, and increasingly clients audit that expectation. PIPEDA applies, professional bodies add their own requirements, and the answer to "how do you protect our data" needs to be specific.
Security questionnaires arriving with the work.
Larger clients now send security questionnaires before engaging. Firms that cannot answer them lose work to firms that can, and the questions are about controls that either exist or do not: multi-factor coverage, endpoint protection, backup testing, incident response.
Work that happens everywhere.
Client sites, home offices, airports. Devices leave the building with client material on them, which makes the endpoint the security perimeter and makes the ability to wipe a lost laptop remotely a real requirement rather than a nice idea.
IT problems that cost chargeable hours.
In a firm that bills time, an hour lost to a broken system is an hour that cannot be recovered. The economics of prevention are unusually clear here, which is why break-fix arrangements tend to be the most expensive option in this sector.
What North Star delivers for professional services.
Practical IT services built around how these businesses actually work.
Controls you can describe to a client.
Endpoint detection and response, enforced multi-factor, email filtering and awareness training, implemented and documented so a client questionnaire is a form-filling exercise rather than a project.
Cybersecurity →Managed endpoints, wipeable remotely.
Intune enrolment with compliance policy, disk encryption verified rather than assumed, and the ability to remove company data from a lost device without touching the owner's personal content.
Managed IT →Backups that have been restored from.
Backup of Microsoft 365 and file data with restores actually performed, and a recovery time you know rather than hope for. Retention policies are not backup and we will say so.
Backup and DR →A plan that fits a partnership.
Budget and refresh planning that works for a firm where capital decisions are made collectively, and a roadmap that can be presented to partners with costs that hold up.
vCIO advisory →What client confidentiality means technically
Accounting, legal and consulting firms hold other people's most sensitive information, and the obligation to protect it is professional rather than merely commercial. That translates into a specific and fairly short list of controls.
Least privilege, per matter.
Not everyone should see every client file. Permissions organised by matter or engagement, with access granted on assignment and removed on completion, is the control that professional obligations actually imply.
The likeliest leak.
Wrong recipient, forwarded chain, attachment that should have been a secure link. External-recipient warnings, secure file sharing instead of attachments, and encryption for genuinely sensitive material address most of it.
Separation that holds technically.
Where a firm needs information barriers between teams, those have to exist in the file permissions and not only in the policy manual. Auditable is the requirement.
Worth knowing: your professional insurer and your clients increasingly ask about this in writing, and the questions have become specific. Multi-factor authentication, encryption, tested backups, monitoring, and a named person responsible. Answering accurately matters more than answering impressively, because a misrepresented control is a reason for a declined claim.
Downtime has a precise cost here
In a firm that bills time, an outage has an exact price: people times hours times rate. That makes the economics of IT unusually easy to reason about, and it changes which risks are worth paying to remove.
The system that records the time.
Practice management, document management and time and billing are the firm. Knowing whether each is cloud-hosted or depends on a server in your own office, and what happens to each if that server dies, is the whole continuity plan in one question.
Some dates cannot move.
Filing deadlines, limitation periods, year ends. Support coverage and maintenance windows get planned around the calendar that actually governs the firm rather than around business hours.
Working from anywhere, securely.
Client work happening from home, a client site or a hotel, without documents living on personal devices. Managed devices and conditional access rather than a VPN and hope.
Security consulting, not just support
A number of the firms we work with need advice and evidence rather than a helpdesk. That is a distinct engagement.
Where you actually stand.
A written assessment scoring your environment against CIS Controls v8, mapped to fixes with effort and cost. Suitable to put in front of a partner group or an insurer. Start with the free assessment.
Help answering the client security review.
Enterprise and public-sector clients send security questionnaires that assume an internal security function. We help answer them accurately, and identify which gaps are worth closing before you answer.
Proof rather than assertion.
Where a client or insurer wants evidence, a penetration test from $2,500 produces a report and an attestation letter you can hand over.
More industries we serve
Want a sector-specific assessment?
We'll review your environment with the compliance and uptime quirks of your industry in mind. 30 minutes, no obligation.
Get a Free Assessment Back to industriesQuestions we get asked in this sector
What does a cyber security consultant actually do for a small firm?
For a firm without an internal security function, the useful work is assessment and prioritisation rather than tooling. That means establishing where you stand against a recognised framework such as CIS Controls v8, producing a written list of gaps ranked by risk with the effort and cost to close each, and then helping you answer the client and insurer questions that prompted the exercise. North Star's free assessment scores seven domains and returns within a business day, and it touches no systems and needs no credentials.
Our clients send us security questionnaires. Can you help answer them?
Yes, and this is one of the commonest reasons professional services firms call us. Enterprise and public-sector procurement questionnaires generally assume an internal security team, and answering them accurately requires knowing what you actually have rather than what sounds reassuring. We help establish the real position, answer accurately, and flag which gaps are worth closing before you submit rather than after a client notices.
How do we protect client confidentiality technically, not just in policy?
Four things carry most of it. Permissions organised by matter or engagement so not everyone sees every client file, with access granted on assignment and removed on completion. Secure file sharing rather than email attachments, with external-recipient warnings enabled. Encryption for genuinely sensitive material. And information barriers between teams that exist in the file permissions rather than only in the policy manual, because auditable separation is what a professional obligation actually implies.
What does IT cost for a firm of our size?
North Star publishes its rates: managed plans from $89 per user per month, hourly support at $95 standard and $143 emergency, $720 for a full day on site. For a firm that bills time, the more useful calculation is the other direction. Multiply your fee earners by their hourly rate by the hours a plausible outage would cost, and compare that to the monthly figure. In professional services that arithmetic is unusually clear-cut, which is why the sector tends to buy continuity rather than the cheapest support.