The Total IT Budget for BC Law Firms

Most firms can tell you what they pay their IT provider. Far fewer can tell you what they spend on technology in total. The managed service invoice is visible every month; Microsoft licensing sits on a credit card, practice management renews annually, the document management contract was signed three years ago by someone who has left, and laptops get bought one at a time out of whatever budget line is convenient.

Add it all together and the number is usually two to four times the managed IT invoice. That’s not a problem in itself — it’s what running a modern practice costs. It becomes a problem when nobody has the total, because you cannot benchmark, negotiate, or plan against a number you don’t have.

This guide gives you the whole picture for firms between 10 and 150 supported users, broken down by category, expressed three ways: dollars per month, dollars per lawyer per year, and percentage of gross revenue.

01 — What Belongs in a Law Firm IT Budget

A complete technology budget has ten lines. Most firms track four of them well, two of them badly, and four not at all.

Category	What It Covers
Managed IT services	Help desk, monitoring, patching, administration, vendor coordination, security operations, and strategic planning. The visible monthly invoice.
Microsoft 365 licensing	Email, Office apps, Teams, SharePoint, identity, device management, and increasingly Copilot. Usually a mix of tiers across the firm.
Practice management	Matter management, time and billing, trust accounting, and client intake — Clio, PCLaw, CosmoLex, Actionstep, Soluno, LEAP, or an equivalent.
Document management	NetDocuments, iManage, Worldox, or a structured SharePoint deployment. Includes storage growth, OCR, and email filing.
Security stack	Endpoint detection and response, email security, multi-factor and privileged access, awareness training, phishing simulation, and dark-web monitoring beyond the Microsoft baseline.
Backup & recovery	Microsoft 365 backup, server and DMS backup, offsite retention, and recovery testing.
Hardware	Workstations, monitors, docks, servers, firewalls, switches, wireless, scanners, and boardroom equipment — amortized across a refresh cycle.
Network & connectivity	Internet circuits, failover, site-to-site links between offices, and remote access infrastructure.
Telephony	Teams Phone, hosted VoIP, call recording where required, and mobile allowances.
AI & research tools	Copilot seats, legal AI assistants, and research platforms where the firm treats them as a technology line rather than a knowledge line.

02 — The Two Benchmarks That Matter

There are only two figures worth carrying into a partners’ meeting.

Why percentage of revenue is the weaker benchmark

Percentage of revenue is the number partners understand, so it belongs in the conversation. But it flatters high-billing firms and punishes efficient ones: a firm with strong realization looks like a disciplined technology spender simply because its denominator is larger. Two firms with identical systems can report 2.5% and 5% purely because of how well they collect.

Why per-lawyer is the stronger benchmark

Cost per lawyer measures what you actually bought. It is comparable across firms, it is easy to trend year over year, and it exposes the thing percentage of revenue hides — whether spending is rising faster than headcount. Our modelling across firm sizes puts the all-in figure between roughly $10,000 and $22,000 per lawyer per year, and that band stays remarkably stable from 10 users to 150.

Converting between the two

To move between benchmarks you need one assumption: revenue per lawyer. For BC firms outside the national full-service tier, a planning range of $400,000 to $600,000 per lawyer is a reasonable starting point — but use your own number if you have it, because it is the single input that most affects the result.

Revenue per lawyer	$12K/lawyer IT spend	$20K/lawyer IT spend
$400,000	3.0% of revenue	5.0% of revenue
$500,000	2.4% of revenue	4.0% of revenue
$600,000	2.0% of revenue	3.3% of revenue

03 — Total IT Budget by Firm Size

All-in technology spend across every category in Section 01, in Canadian dollars. Lawyer counts assume roughly 40–43% of headcount are lawyers, which is typical for BC firms of this size.

Firm size	Monthly	Annual	Per user/mo	Per lawyer/yr
10 users (~4 lawyers)	$3,700–7,200	$44K–86K	$370–720	$11K–22K
25 users (~10 lawyers)	$9,500–18,700	$114K–225K	$380–750	$11K–22K
50 users (~21 lawyers)	$19,700–39,000	$236K–468K	$395–780	$11K–22K
100 users (~43 lawyers)	$38,800–79,400	$465K–953K	$390–795	$11K–22K
150 users (~65 lawyers)	$55,600–119,800	$667K–1.44M	$370–800	$10K–22K

The same numbers as a share of revenue

Applying the revenue-per-lawyer assumptions from Section 02:

Firm size	Implied revenue @ $400K/lawyer	IT as % of revenue	Implied revenue @ $600K/lawyer	IT as % of revenue
10 users	$1.6M	2.8–5.4%	$2.4M	1.9–3.6%
25 users	$4.0M	2.9–5.6%	$6.0M	1.9–3.7%
50 users	$8.4M	2.8–5.6%	$12.6M	1.9–3.7%
100 users	$17.2M	2.7–5.5%	$25.8M	1.8–3.7%
150 users	$26.0M	2.6–5.5%	$39.0M	1.7–3.7%

04 — Line-by-Line, Per User Per Month

Canadian dollars, per supported user, per month. Multiply by your headcount to build a bottom-up budget.

Category	10 users	25 users	50 users	100 users	150 users
Managed IT services	$155–210	$135–185	$120–165	$105–150	$95–140
Microsoft 365 licensing	$38–58	$40–62	$42–70	$45–78	$45–82
Practice management	$55–110	$60–120	$60–125	$55–120	$50–115
Document management	$0–35	$25–75	$45–95	$55–110	$55–115
Security stack	$15–30	$15–32	$16–35	$16–38	$16–40
Backup & recovery	$8–18	$8–18	$9–20	$9–22	$9–22
Hardware (amortized)	$45–85	$45–85	$45–90	$45–90	$45–95
Network & connectivity	$15–35	$12–28	$10–24	$8–20	$7–18
Telephony	$12–28	$12–26	$12–25	$11–24	$11–24
AI & research add-ons	$0–45	$0–50	$5–60	$10–70	$10–75
Subtotal	$343–654	$352–681	$364–709	$359–722	$343–726
Plus projects & contingency	$370–719	$380–749	$393–780	$388–794	$370–799

05 — Where the Money Goes as You Grow

The total per lawyer stays flat. The composition does not. These are midpoint shares of total technology spend.

10-user firm

150-user firm

What that shift means

At ten people, technology spending is mostly about keeping people working: support, devices, and the system that produces bills. Document management is often a folder structure and a naming convention.

By 150 people, document management has become the second-largest line in the budget, security tooling has roughly doubled per seat, and AI licensing has appeared as a real category. Managed IT has fallen from 37% to 22% of spend — not because you buy less support, but because everything around it has grown.

06 — What Firms Leave Out of the Budget

These are the lines that turn a carefully built budget into an overrun. Every one of them is predictable.

Commonly Missed	Typical Impact
Hardware refresh cycle	A 50-user firm on a four-year cycle replaces roughly 12 workstations a year. Skipping it for two years doesn’t save money; it creates a $60,000 year.
Microsoft 365 backup	Frequently assumed to be included with the licence. It isn’t. Budget it separately.
Document storage growth	DMS storage grows every year and OCR can double the footprint. Overage charges arrive without warning.
Onboarding and offboarding	Every new hire needs a device, licences, and setup time. Every departure needs an account and data handled properly.
Stranded licences	Licences for people who left, tiers nobody uses, and duplicate tools bought by different practice groups. Common finding: 5–15% of licensing spend.
Security awareness training	Increasingly expected by insurers and institutional clients. Modest cost, frequently unbudgeted.
Annual vendor increases	Legal software renewals commonly rise 5–10% a year. Budget the increase before it arrives.
Project work	Migrations, office moves, and system replacements are real costs that live outside the monthly run rate.
Cyber insurance requirements	Renewal questionnaires increasingly require controls the firm doesn’t have yet, on the insurer’s timeline rather than yours.

07 — Software Cost Reference

Published and reported pricing for the platforms BC firms most commonly run. Vendors move these figures without notice, and several have moved pricing behind quote forms — verify before you budget.

Microsoft 365 — Canadian list, per user per month

Plan	Annual term	Notes
Business Basic	$9.50	Web and mobile apps, hosted email. Rarely sufficient for a lawyer.
Business Standard (with Copilot)	$31.90	Desktop Office apps, Teams, SharePoint.
Business Premium (with Copilot)	$43.40	Adds Entra ID P1, Intune, Defender for Business. The practical baseline for a law firm.
Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on	$28.50	Requires a qualifying base licence. Promotional pricing has been running below list.

Microsoft Canadian list prices as published August 2026. Microsoft repackaged the Business tiers in 2026 to fold Copilot into Standard and Premium, so the widely repeated “about $30 for Business Premium” figure is out of date. Prices exclude tax. Monthly-commitment pricing runs roughly 20% higher than annual.

Practice management and document management — reported ranges, USD

Platform	Per user/month	Notes
Clio	$49–149	Only the entry tier is publicly priced as of 2026; higher tiers are quote-gated. Most firms land in the $89–149 band. AI add-ons are extra.
CosmoLex / PCLaw / Soluno	$60–120	Trust accounting depth varies significantly between platforms.
NetDocuments	$50–65 base	Reported base subscription. Real-world cost commonly runs $80–120+ once storage, OCR, and email management are included. Implementation is separate.
iManage	Quote only	Priced by negotiation; comparable to or above NetDocuments at firm scale.

Practice and document management vendors do not publish comprehensive price lists. The figures above are reported market ranges in US dollars from third-party pricing research, converted and negotiated pricing will differ. Treat them as a sanity check on a quote, not as a quote.

08 — Build Your Own Number

Half a day of work produces a figure you can defend to the partnership. The sequence matters more than the precision.

Step	What to Do
1. Collect	Pull twelve months of every technology-related invoice, subscription, and credit card charge. Include the ones on someone’s personal card. Most firms are surprised by the total.
2. Categorize	Sort into the ten categories in Section 01. Anything that doesn’t fit goes in an eleventh pile you will look at closely.
3. Normalize hardware	Replace last year’s actual hardware spend with your four-year refresh cost divided by four. One year of purchases tells you nothing about the run rate.
4. Divide	Calculate cost per supported user per month and cost per lawyer per year. Compare against Sections 03 and 04.
5. Find the gaps	Any category at or near zero is either genuinely unnecessary or quietly deferred. Decide which, in writing.
6. Add contingency	Allow 8–10% for projects and the unplanned. Then map next year’s known events: hires, office changes, renewals, end-of-support dates.

09 — Reducing Cost Without Adding Risk

There is real money to be found in most firm technology budgets. It is rarely in the places partners suggest looking first.

Lever	Typical Saving
Licence right-sizing	Reclaim licences for departed staff, downgrade tiers nobody uses, eliminate duplicate tools. Commonly 5–15% of licensing spend, available immediately.
Annual commitment	Microsoft and most legal vendors price annual terms roughly 20% below monthly. If your headcount is stable, monthly flexibility is expensive.
Tier mix	Not everyone needs the same licence. Reception, accounting, and part-time staff often sit two tiers above what they use.
Hardware standardization	One or two workstation models, bought in batches on a fixed cycle, reduce both purchase and support cost.
Server elimination	Firms still running a file server or on-premises DMS often find the maintenance, backup, power, and refresh costs exceed the cloud equivalent once fully counted.
Renewal discipline	Diary every renewal 90 days ahead. Vendors price renewals for firms that aren’t paying attention differently than for firms that are.
Consolidating providers	Multiple vendors handling network, phones, security, and support usually means paying twice for coordination that still isn’t happening.

10 — Frequently Asked Questions

It is the right range to start from, not a target to hit. Litigation-heavy firms with document and eDiscovery volume sit higher. Transactional and solicitor practices sit lower. What matters more is whether the spend is deliberate and whether any category is at zero by accident.

Because two forces cancel. Managed IT, connectivity, and support get cheaper per seat as firms grow. Document management, security tooling, and AI licensing get more expensive per seat over the same range. The net is close to flat between 10 and 150 users.

Most firms track Westlaw and Lexis as a knowledge or library cost rather than technology. Either treatment is defensible. Be consistent year over year, and state which convention you used whenever you quote a percentage-of-revenue figure.

Conservatively, and by seat rather than firm-wide. Copilot and legal AI licensing is currently the fastest-moving line in the budget, and adoption is uneven — a subset of your lawyers will use it heavily and the rest will not touch it. Start with the users who will actually use it and expand from evidence.

Not necessarily — a cloud-first firm with no server, a single practice management platform, and standard licensing legitimately runs lean. It is a problem if you are below the range because of deferral rather than design. The test is whether you can name what you are not spending on and explain why.

Eight to ten percent of the annual technology budget. Firms that hold nothing back still spend the money; they just spend it as a surprise, usually alongside whatever caused it.

It changes the shape more than the size. Capital spending on servers falls and monthly subscription cost rises. The real gains tend to come from resilience, remote access, and reduced downtime rather than from the invoice total.

Annually, with a mid-year check on renewals and headcount. Vendor pricing has moved materially in the last two years, and a budget built on last year’s list prices is already wrong.

This guide is provided for general information only. It is not legal, accounting, or financial advice, and is not an interpretation of Law Society of British Columbia rules or any other professional obligation. All figures are planning ranges in Canadian dollars unless otherwise stated and are not an offer or a quote. Third-party pricing is as reported at the time of writing and changes without notice. © 2026 Cloud Collective. All rights reserved.