This is an illustrative scenario, not an account of a specific client engagement. Consider the IT lead at a commercial law firm in Victoria Island, Lagos, with a recurring complaint from fee earners: their PCs are slow. Documents take too long to open, Outlook lags with large email archives, and the PDF review software — essential for contract work — is noticeably sluggish on complex documents.
The Problem
Take a firm running 5-year-old Core i5 systems with 8GB RAM and spinning hard drives. Windows 11 has been deployed but the hardware is undersized for it. Legal work generates enormous document archives — an attorney can accumulate tens of gigabytes of email data in Outlook. The combination of HDDs and insufficient RAM creates constant disk thrashing.
The Approach
A site assessment comes first, but for a workload this uniform a standardised workstation spec across all 8 seats is the right answer:
- Intel Core i5-13400 (10-core efficiency for background tasks)
- 32GB DDR5 (eliminates paging for even the heaviest Outlook archives)
- 1TB NVMe SSD (dramatically faster document and email access)
- Integrated graphics (no GPU needed for legal workflows)
- mATX form factor for space efficiency in the open-plan office
The Outcome
Two changes do the work here, and neither is exotic. Replacing an HDD with an NVMe SSD is the single largest improvement a machine like this can receive — boot times, document opening, and Outlook search are all disk-bound, and the disk was the bottleneck. Going from 8GB to 32GB stops the paging that made everything else worse.
The useful way to justify this spend is billable time. Work out what recovering even a few minutes per fee earner per day is worth against the hardware cost — for a firm billing by the hour, that calculation is usually the whole argument.