BigHand Retires On-Premise FTP With Files.com as Law-Firm Delivery Stays Live

BigHand builds software for law firms: the workflow, resource management, business intelligence, and document tools that run the operational and financial side of a practice. More than 3,300 firms use it, including 81% of the Am Law 200 and 82% of the UK Top 200, and the company operates across the UK and Europe, Australasia, and the USA.

That product does not stay at BigHand. Client firms run BigHand software in their own environments, so installers, patches, and recurring business-intelligence reports have to travel from BigHand into each firm for the life of the relationship. File delivery is not adjacent to BigHand's service. It is part of the service.

Every Delivery Had a Person in the Middle

The channel carrying that delivery was an on-premise legacy FTP/SFTP server. The files themselves sat on a Windows file server in one location, so every share started with a person: someone on the client services team retrieved the file, uploaded it, and sent it to the client by hand. That was the standing routine for every installer and every patch going out to firms on three continents.

The cost was not only the manual work. BigHand needed to host different clients' documents in different regions, and multi-region storage was a requirement a single-location, on-premise server could never meet. The delivery infrastructure had stopped fitting the business it carried.

Replacing a Channel That Could Not Go Down

The server could not simply be switched off. It was the live channel to law-firm clients, so the replacement had to take delivery over while delivery kept running.

BigHand needed three things from whatever came next. It had to be cloud-hosted, with no box left to patch and maintain. It had to hand files to law firms that would install nothing and create no accounts. And it had to store data in multiple regions, with BigHand choosing the region folder by folder.

BigHand selected Files.com and moved its client services delivery off the on-premise estate and into the cloud. That move ultimately did more than replace the FTP server: it established a platform for jurisdiction-specific hosting and new delivery work such as client reporting.

The Agent Moved the Data, Then Share Links Took Over Delivery

Files.com became the delivery platform itself: the centralized location BigHand's installers and documents ship from, rather than a cloud copy of the old server.

The data moved first. In May 2023, BigHand installed the Files.com Agent on a Windows server, and the Agent synced the on-premise data into the cloud site over an outbound-only connection. Once the data was resident in the cloud, BigHand retired the Agent. It was scaffolding for the move, not a permanent piece of the architecture.

Delivery moved next. Client services shares installers and patches through Files.com Share Links on BigHand's own subdomain. A client follows a link that reads as BigHand and downloads in the browser, with no account and no client software. Storage regions were provisioned across the UK and Europe, Australasia, and the USA, with folders pinned to specific regions. BigHand also brought Files.com under its existing Azure AD identity environment through single sign-on and SCIM provisioning.

BigHand ran the transition incrementally over roughly two years rather than as a cutover, because the channel stayed live the whole way. The legacy FTP/SFTP estate was retired once everything ran through Files.com.

Nearly 5,000 Share Links, and Reporting Placed by Jurisdiction

With the transition complete, BigHand replaced its single-location FTP channel with browser-based delivery. Client services no longer maintains FTP infrastructure, and law-firm recipients follow a BigHand-branded link without installing client software or creating an account.

• The on-premise FTP/SFTP server is retired, and the temporary migration Agent is gone with it. There is no FTP/SFTP delivery server left for BigHand to patch and maintain.
• Share links carry the delivery at volume: over 1,700 were created in 2023, and nearly 3,300 the following year. Use of the channel nearly doubled year over year.
• Monthly client reporting became a new delivery channel on the same platform. BigHand uploads each client's reports, and the client retrieves them through a secure link.
• Reporting folders for cloud customers are hosted in the region each client requires, with UK and Canadian regions in use. Placing a client's data in a jurisdiction is a folder setting on Files.com, not an infrastructure project.

From Maintaining a Server to Extending a Platform

The immediate result was retiring the FTP server and its maintenance burden. The compounding one is that new delivery work now lands on a platform that already exists: when BigHand added client reporting, there was no new channel to build, and when a client requires a new jurisdiction, there is no new server to stand up.