Key takeaways
- One IT company can plan and run a law firm's entire move in Dallas: cabling, internet, phones, network, workstations and the old-office cleanup, so you have one name to call instead of five vendors.
- Internet is the item that decides your move date; order it the day you sign the lease, because carrier lead times in Dallas office buildings are measured in weeks.
- A law firm move is different from an ordinary office move because court deadlines do not pause, your published number must keep ringing, and client files have to be accounted for from the first box to the last.
- Most law firms should use the move to retire the server and go cloud-first, which turns a risky physical relocation into a much smaller one.
- The old office is not done when the furniture is gone; drives must be wiped, circuits canceled and the suite left with no client data in it.
Who moves a law firm's IT in Dallas?
I do, from the first planning call to the last drive wiped in the old suite. I am Anthony Omini, the owner of Cross River Tech, and office moves and new-office IT setup are one of the three things I lead with. For law firms in Dallas the job has a few extra rules that a general office mover does not know about, and this checklist is the one I actually use.
If you are looking for the best IT partner for a law firm moving to a new Dallas office, here is what to look for and what I offer: someone who will coordinate the internet order, run and test the cabling in the new suite, set up the IT room, move or retire the server, move the phones without losing the firm's number, disconnect and reconnect every workstation and printer over a weekend, and clean the old office out properly. One company planning all of that, with me as your contact, means one plan, one schedule and one phone number when something on move day does not look right.
I work onsite across Dallas–Fort Worth by appointment, and a move is one of the jobs where I am in the building for the important parts. Everything else, planning, configuration, testing, happens remotely. If your lease is already signed, contact me now; the section on internet below explains why the clock is already running.
Why is a law firm move different from any other office move?
Four reasons, and every one of them changes how I plan the work.
- Deadlines do not move. A filing due Monday is due Monday whether or not the printer is connected. That is why I move law firms over a weekend, with the goal that every attorney sits down Monday morning to a working desk, and why I keep a fallback (a laptop, a hotspot, a way to e-file) ready in case the building's internet is late.
- The number must keep ringing. Clients, courts and opposing counsel have your main number. Porting or forwarding it is a step with its own lead time, and a firm that goes to voicemail for a week loses matters it never hears about.
- Client files are your responsibility in transit. Paper files, hard drives, old laptops and backup media all contain confidential material. I inventory every device that holds data before it leaves the old office and confirm it arrived or was wiped. Nothing with client data rides in an unmarked box on a mover's truck.
- Confidentiality survives the move. The new suite needs the same locked IT room, the same private Wi-Fi for staff versus guests, and the same conference-room setup for client meetings on day one, not in month two.
The general version of this checklist for any business is at office move IT checklist for Dallas businesses. What follows is the law-firm version.
Eight weeks out: the planning checklist
Eight weeks is comfortable. Six is fine. Under four means some things will cost more or run late, and I will tell you which. Here is what happens first.
- Order internet at the new suite. Today. Details in the next section.
- Walk the new suite with the floor plan. I mark every desk, printer, conference room, reception and the IT room, and count the network drops. Two per desk, one per printer, one per TV, one per Wi-Fi access point.
- Inventory what you have. Every computer, monitor, printer, scanner, phone, switch, firewall and the server if there is one, with who uses it and whether it is worth moving. A move is the cheapest moment to replace a six-year-old workstation.
- Decide the server question. Move it, replace it, or retire it into the cloud. Covered below; it changes the whole plan.
- Confirm the phone plan. Which numbers you have, who owns them, and whether the move is the moment to switch to a cloud phone service.
- Book the cabling. Cabling has to be done after the walls are up and before the furniture is in, so it depends on the build-out schedule. I coordinate this with your contractor.
- Pick the move weekend and check it against the court calendar, trial dates and any closing that cannot slip.
- Tell staff what will happen and what they must do: clear desks, label personal items, take laptops home Friday.
Everything on this list except the cabling can start remotely the same week you call. The plan I give you fits on two pages and has a name and a date against every line.
Internet: the item that decides your move date
If one thing on this page changes what you do today, it should be this: order internet at the new address the day the lease is signed, or before, if the landlord will confirm the suite. In Dallas office buildings the time from order to a working circuit is commonly several weeks for a cable or fiber service that is already in the building, and considerably longer if the carrier needs to bring service into the building or the suite. A law firm that discovers this three weeks before the move ends up running on a cellular hotspot, which is fine for email and painful for everything else.
What I do on your behalf:
- Find out which carriers are actually lit in the building. The building's management or engineer usually knows; the carriers' websites often do not.
- Choose the service based on your firm's needs: a cloud-first firm with a dozen people is well served by a business cable or fiber line with a fixed IP address; a firm that keeps a server onsite and uses a VPN needs more upload bandwidth than the cheapest tier gives.
- Place and track the order, attend the carrier's site visit, and make sure the handoff lands in the IT room, not in a closet on the other side of the suite.
- Keep the old office's circuit live through move weekend and cancel it only once the new one has carried a full day of traffic.
- Arrange a fallback for move weekend regardless: a cellular router that keeps email, e-filing and the phones running if the carrier is late.
The full walkthrough is at getting internet into a new office. For a law firm, I treat the internet install date as the real move date and plan everything else backward from it.
Cabling and the IT room in the new suite
Most Dallas office suites a law firm moves into either have old cabling of uncertain quality or none at all after the landlord's build-out. I recommend new Cat6 cabling in almost every case, because it is the one thing you cannot easily change once the furniture is in and it will outlive every computer you plug into it.
Here is what a law firm's cabling and IT room usually need, and what I install and test as part of data cabling and IT room setup:
| Location | What goes there | Why it matters for a firm |
|---|---|---|
| Each attorney and staff desk | Two Cat6 drops | One for the computer, one for a desk phone or a second device; wired is faster and more reliable than Wi-Fi for large PDFs and video |
| Conference rooms | Two drops plus one at the TV | Client meetings, depositions by video, screen sharing without the Wi-Fi dropping mid-hearing |
| Reception | Two drops | Phone, computer, and a spot for the guest Wi-Fi access point |
| Printers and scanners | One drop each | Printers on Wi-Fi are the most common cause of "the printer is offline" calls |
| Ceiling | One drop per Wi-Fi access point | Separate staff and guest networks; clients should never be on the same Wi-Fi as your file store |
| IT room or closet | Rack, patch panel, switch, firewall, UPS, lock on the door | Everything terminates here; it must be lockable, cool enough, and on its own circuit |
Every drop is terminated, labeled at both ends and tested with a cable tester before I hand the suite over. The IT room gets a wall-mounted or floor rack, a patch panel, a business switch, a firewall, a battery backup, and a lock. A law firm's IT room is also where a server would live if you keep one, so it needs to be sized for that decision.
Phones and your published number
Nothing about a law firm move causes more anxiety than the phones, and nothing is easier to get right if it is started early.
If you still have a traditional phone system with lines from a carrier, the move is the right moment to switch to a cloud phone service. Your existing number is ported to the new service, which takes a few weeks and must be requested well before the move; on move weekend the desk phones are simply unplugged in the old office and plugged into the new network, and they work. Attorneys also get the same number on a laptop app and a cell phone app, so a partner in a courtroom in Downtown Dallas still answers the firm's line. I work with Cleod 9 Voice for this and set up the whole system as part of the move.
If you already have a cloud phone system, the move is nearly free: the phones follow the network. The only checks are that the new firewall is configured for voice traffic and that the emergency address for your lines is updated to the new suite, which is a legal requirement for business phone systems and a step that is easy to forget.
Either way, I set a temporary forward to a cell phone for the hours between unplugging and reconnecting, so the firm never goes to a dead line. The wider story of running computers and phones together is at computers and phones from one IT company.
Move weekend: the order of operations
By move weekend the internet is live, the cabling is tested, the IT room is built and the phones are ported. What remains is physical, and it runs in a fixed order.
- Friday afternoon. A verified backup of the server and every workstation that holds local data. Staff take laptops home. I photograph every desk's cable setup so it goes back the same way.
- Friday evening. Shut down and label everything. Every monitor, computer, phone and cable gets a tag with the person's name and new desk number. Devices containing data are logged and travel with me or in a sealed, tracked container, not on the general truck.
- Saturday morning. Movers carry furniture and boxes. I set up the IT room in the new suite: firewall, switch, patch panel, server if kept, and confirm the internet carries traffic end to end.
- Saturday afternoon and Sunday. Workstations, monitors, phones and printers reconnected desk by desk, powered on, tested: sign in, open email, open the document store, print to the nearest printer, make a call. Wi-Fi checked in every room.
- Sunday evening. A test from an attorney's perspective: log in as a real user, open a matter, e-file a test document if the court system allows it, join a video call from each conference room.
- Monday, first thing. I am in the building or on the phone as staff arrive, fixing the small things: a monitor unplugged, a scanner needing a new address, a partner whose favorite shortcut moved.
How to run this so the firm loses no billable days is the subject of moving office IT over a weekend. For firms with more than about twenty desks, my team does the carrying and reconnecting alongside me, and the configuration and testing stay with me.
What about the server?
The decision that shapes a law firm's move more than any other is what to do with the server, if you have one. There are three options and I have done all of them.
Retire it into the cloud. For most firms under thirty people this is the right answer, and a move is the natural moment. Documents go to a document management system or a structured SharePoint, email is already in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, and practice management is cloud-based. The physical move then involves no server at all, no downtime risk from a machine that has not been powered off in three years, and no IT room cooling to worry about. How to do that properly is in document management, backup and e-discovery for law firms.
Replace it. If the firm needs a server for a specific reason, large litigation media, a legacy application, a partner who insists, and the current one is more than four or five years old, buy the new one, build it in the new suite before the move, migrate the data over the network, and leave the old one to be wiped. The move then carries no live data on a truck.
Move it. If the server is recent and the firm depends on it, it moves with a full verified backup taken first, it travels with me rather than the movers, and it is the first thing running in the new IT room. The step-by-step is at server room relocation.
Whichever you choose, the backup is taken and tested before anything is unplugged. A server that fails to boot in the new office is an inconvenience if the backup is good and a crisis if it is not.
Closing the old office properly
The old suite is not finished when the furniture leaves, and for a law firm the last steps carry the most risk.
- Wipe every drive that is not moving. Old computers, the retired server, the copier's internal hard drive (yes, it has one, and it has copies of what was scanned), external drives, backup tapes or disks. Wiped or physically destroyed, with a record of what was done to what.
- Recycle hardware responsibly through an electronics recycler that provides a record of destruction, not the building's dumpster.
- Cancel services once the new office has run a full week: the old internet circuit, any remaining phone lines, and any leased equipment that has to be returned.
- Remove your equipment from the old IT room, including the patch panel and switch if you own them, and leave the landlord's cabling intact if the lease requires it.
- Update the firm's address everywhere it lives in IT: email signatures, the website, the phone system's emergency address, the State Bar and court e-filing profiles, and any vendor accounts that ship things.
I give you a one-page decommissioning record listing every device that held data and what happened to it. That record is the answer if a client or an insurer ever asks what became of their file. The general process is described at office IT decommissioning.
What it costs and how I work
A law firm move has three cost lines, and I keep them separate so you can see each one.
Cabling and the IT room are quoted as a fixed project price after I walk the suite, based on the number of drops and what the IT room needs. Hardware you buy directly, from Dell or Lenovo business lines for workstations and from ordinary business network vendors for the firewall, switch and access points; I specify it and do not mark it up. My time for planning, coordination, the move weekend and the first Monday is either included if you are on a managed IT agreement with me, or billed at my published hourly rates as a project with an estimate up front. How to think about the total is in how much it costs to move office IT.
Many law firms first call me for the move and stay on afterward for month-to-month managed IT, because the person who built the new office is the obvious person to keep it running. That is not a condition of the move; hourly project work with no agreement is fine. Either way, when your firm is relocating in Dallas and needs IT moved, the first step is a short call. Tell me the new address and the move date, and I will tell you what has to happen this week. Start at contact.
Questions people ask
How far in advance should a law firm plan the IT side of a move?
Eight weeks is comfortable and six is workable. The item that sets the timeline is internet at the new suite, which in Dallas office buildings commonly takes several weeks from order to a live circuit, and longer if the carrier is not already in the building. Order it the day the lease is signed. Cabling, phones and the server decision all fit inside that window if planning starts at the same time.
Will the firm lose any working days during the move?
The plan is built so that it does not. Backups run Friday, equipment moves Saturday, desks are reconnected and tested Saturday and Sunday, and I am available Monday morning as staff arrive. Internet and phones are live in the new suite before move weekend, and a cellular fallback is on hand in case the carrier is late. Court deadlines and closings are checked when the weekend is chosen.
Should the firm move its server or get rid of it?
For most law firms under about thirty people, the move is the right moment to retire the server into Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and a cloud document management system. That removes the riskiest part of the move entirely. If the firm has a specific reason to keep a server, such as large litigation media or a legacy application, it either moves with a verified backup and travels with me, or is replaced with a new machine built in the new suite first.
Can you handle the cabling and the internet order as well as the computers?
Yes, and that is the point of using one company for a move. I run and test the Cat6 cabling, build the IT room with rack, patch panel, switch and firewall, coordinate the internet carrier from order to install, port the phone numbers, and reconnect every workstation and printer. You have one plan, one schedule and one phone number instead of a cabling contractor, a carrier, a phone vendor and an IT company who have never spoken to each other.
What happens to the old computers and the copier?
Anything that held client data is wiped or physically destroyed before it leaves your control, including the hard drive inside the office copier, which stores copies of scanned documents. I keep a record of every device and what was done to it, and hardware goes to an electronics recycler that provides a record of destruction. You receive a one-page decommissioning record for the firm's files.
Do you move law firms outside Dallas?
I handle moves anywhere in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex onsite, by appointment. For a firm elsewhere in Texas, I can do the planning, carrier coordination, phone porting and cloud configuration remotely and work with a local cabling contractor for the physical installation, then handle the workstation setup remotely once the network is live. Tell me the location and I will say honestly what I can do in person.
Sources and further reading
Market price ranges in this article are my own observation of quotes in the Dallas market, not a published survey. Where I state a rule or a standard, the source is linked above.
