Standardising AV across multiple law firm offices: what it actually takes for IT

The tickets arrive from three different offices in the same morning. One room will not pick up the ceiling microphone. One display shows the wrong input. One partner has given up and moved the meeting to a laptop on a desk.

None of these is a difficult fault. What makes them expensive is that each room was specified at a different time, by a different supplier, to a different standard, so each one has to be diagnosed from scratch.

For legal IT teams and workplace technology leads, this is the real cost of an inconsistent estate. It is rarely the equipment that fails. It is the absence of a single pattern that everything can be measured against.

This article looks at what standardisation actually means in practice, the technical decisions that determine whether it holds, how a rollout can proceed without disrupting fee-earning work, and how one national firm approached it.

Table of Contents

• What standardisation actually means
• The decisions that determine whether it holds
• Rolling out without disrupting fee-earning work
• What this looks like in practice
• Building the standard in stages
• FAQs

What standardisation actually means

Standardisation is often heard as identical equipment in every room, which is neither realistic nor necessary. A four-person meeting room and a partners’ boardroom have different requirements, and offices acquired at different times have different ceilings, cable routes and power provision.

What can be made identical is behaviour. The same action starts a meeting. The same panel sits in the same position by the door. The same platform launches by default. A colleague from one office can walk into a room in another and use it without thinking.

Behavioural consistency is also what makes support tractable. When rooms follow a defined pattern, a fault becomes a known deviation from that pattern rather than an investigation, and first-line staff can resolve more without escalation.

The decisions that determine whether it holds

Most standardisation programmes are undone by a handful of decisions taken early and revisited too late.

For IT and facilities teams, these are the ones worth settling before anything is installed:

• Teams and Zoom integration — which platform is native to the room, how guest meetings on the other platform are handled, and whether that behaves identically in every office.
• Secure video conferencing — how calls are hosted, how external participants join, and how access controls behave, applied the same way across sites so no office quietly runs to a weaker standard.
• Network considerations — a consistent approach to bandwidth, VLAN design, cabling standards and how room devices are provisioned and addressed across sites.
• Support ownership — where the boundary sits between internal IT and the integrator, what the response expectations are, and how faults are raised from a room without a phone call to a specific person.
• Monitoring and firmware — whether room health is visible centrally, and who is responsible for keeping device firmware aligned so rooms do not diverge again over time.
• Documentation — a single room specification and a short user-facing guide that applies everywhere, rather than notes held by whoever commissioned each office.

Settling these produces a written standard. Without one, each new office is a fresh negotiation.

Rolling out without disrupting fee-earning work

The constraint in a law firm is rarely budget alone. It is that meeting rooms are in near-constant use and cannot be handed over to contractors for a fortnight.

Programmes that run smoothly tend to work room by room rather than floor by floor, with work scheduled around the diary rather than against it, and with a pilot room commissioned and used properly before the pattern is repeated. A pilot surfaces the things a drawing cannot — where people actually sit, which cable is actually reached for, what the room sounds like when it is full.

It also helps to agree in advance how the estate will be kept aligned once the programme finishes, since a standard maintained by nobody drifts within a year or two.

What this looks like in practice

Viewpoint delivered a large-scale technology upgrade for Mills & Reeve LLP across multiple locations, completed cost-efficiently and with minimised environmental impact. The multi-site nature of the work, and the logistics of delivering it consistently across sites, made it a close match for the challenges described here.

The full Mills & Reeve case study covers the detail.

Building the standard in stages

Few firms can refit every room at once, and few need to. A workable sequence is to define the standard first, prove it in one room, apply it to the client-facing spaces where inconsistency is most visible, and then bring the internal rooms into line as refresh cycles allow.

The measure of success is unglamorous: fewer tickets, shorter resolutions, and rooms that behave the same way regardless of which office they sit in. Firms setting that up usually want clarity on where responsibility sits afterwards, which is why ongoing AV support and maintenance is worth agreeing at the same time as the design rather than after handover.

Viewpoint AV helps law firms standardise AV across every office, with support arrangements that hold once the rollout is finished — get in touch.

FAQs

How do you standardise AV across multiple law firm offices?
By defining a written room standard covering how meetings start, how rooms are laid out, how they connect to the network and who supports them, then applying it office by office. The standard matters more than the specific hardware, since equipment models change over time.

Should every meeting room in a law firm use the same AV equipment?
Not necessarily. Room sizes and building constraints vary, so the aim is consistent behaviour and a consistent user experience rather than an identical parts list.

Who should own AV support in a multi-office law firm?
The boundary needs to be explicit: what internal IT resolves, what the integrator handles, and how a room fault is escalated. Ambiguity here is a common cause of long resolution times, particularly in offices without local IT presence.

What should legal IT teams look for in secure video conferencing across offices?
A consistent standard rather than a per-office arrangement: the same approach to how calls are hosted, how external participants join, and how access is controlled, applied everywhere. Consistent cabling, predictable bandwidth for concurrent calls, and central monitoring sit alongside that, so no single office becomes the weak point.

How can a firm keep its AV estate consistent after a rollout?
By assigning ownership of the standard, keeping firmware and configurations aligned centrally, and referring back to the written specification whenever a room is refreshed or a new office is fitted out.