When Rich Pacheco joined Partridge Snow & Hahn, he didn’t come from the legal industry, which turned out to be a strength. After years at AAA, a 115-year-old company steeped in tradition, he stepped into a law firm with the same cautious relationship to change. But what he found wasn’t just a slow pace – it was an IT model that had stopped keeping up.
Client Snapshot
- Firm: Partridge Snow & Hahn LLP
- Location: Providence, Rhode Island (with offices across New England)
- Size: 70 employees – 40 attorneys, 30 professional staff
- Challenge: A legacy on-prem IT setup that was increasingly difficult to maintain and standardize. Systems didn’t communicate easily, support was inconsistent, and remote access was unreliable. Leadership wanted to strengthen security, improve responsiveness and modernize without disruption.
- Solution: Afinety Cloud Platform (ACP 2.0) replaced the firm’s aging infrastructure with a secure, fully managed cloud environment built for legal. The transition emphasized user experience, security, and business continuity – giving attorneys and staff consistent access to firm systems and data from any location. Afinety’s legal-specific expertise and dedicated support team now complement the firm’s internal IT resources, handling everything from performance management to security updates behind the scenes.
- Results: A smooth migration, improved system reliability and higher end-user satisfaction. Attorneys and staff can log in from anywhere and work without interruption, while leadership has the confidence that the firm’s data and operations are protected. Partridge Snow & Hahn gained not just a technology upgrade, but a partnership that empowers its internal team and strengthens the firm’s overall IT foundation.
When Growth Outpaced the Existing IT Model
When Rich arrived at Partridge Snow & Hahn, he inherited a small internal IT team supporting a growing and increasingly complex technology environment. The team was working hard to meet the firm’s needs, but like many organizations, they were balancing day-to-day support with the challenges of maintaining and modernizing existing infrastructure.
“The challenge wasn’t effort – it was consistency,” Rich explains. “We had multiple ways of doing things, and the team didn’t always have visibility into what others were handling.”
Remote access was also becoming more important as attorneys and staff needed greater flexibility in how and where they worked.
“Most people worked in the office, but if they needed to log in remotely, it was a gamble,” said Rich.
Rather than pursuing change for the sake of change, Rich was looking for a way to build on the foundation already in place while improving reliability, consistency and the overall user experience.
From a Conversation to a Partnership
At a legal tech event, a partner introduced Rich to Afinety. He wasn’t shopping for a new provider, but a two-and-a-half-hour call with Afinety’s Frank Mariello changed his mind.
“I didn’t know I was looking for Afinety because I didn’t know Afinety existed,” Rich says. “Frank wasn’t selling; he was teaching. I learned more in those two hours about IT strategy than I had in years.”
When the call ended, Rich did something he’d never done before: he offered to pay the vendor.
“I literally called him back and said, ‘Please send me an invoice for your time.’ You just don’t see that level of knowledge-sharing anymore.”
What Success Looked Like
Rich made his expectations clear from day one.
“I wanted my end users to say, ‘This is the best thing we ever did,’” he explains. “And I didn’t want to worry about one person going on vacation and everything falling apart.”
His priorities were simple but firm:
- Business continuity without bottlenecks
- End-user experience first
- Security uplift across the firm
The Result: Smooth, Secure and Supported
From migration to go-live, the experience exceeded expectations.
“One of our founding partners told me, ‘I’ve been through a lot of system conversions, and this was probably the most seamless,’” Rich says. “In 20 minutes, I was logged in and working.”
The rollout didn’t bring frustration or downtime, just curiosity. “People were logging in that first hour, asking questions, not saying it didn’t work. To me, that was phenomenal.”
What Makes Afinety Different
For Rich, the difference wasn’t just in technology. It was in the partnership.
“You had exactly what I was looking for,” he says. “I was going to be able to sleep at night.”
He also values Afinety’s legal specialization. “It’s hard for small internal teams to do it all,” he says. “Partners like Afinety bring scale, structure and legal-specific expertise that’s tough to build in-house.”
From Vendor to Partner
Rich doesn’t use the word “vendor.”
“You want somebody you can work with,” he says. “We tried to shop Afinety, and there really was nothing to shop them against.”
For Partridge Snow & Hahn, the transition was about more than technology. The firm gained a reliable platform, proactive support and an IT partner who feels like part of the team.
Or as Rich puts it, “You gave me back my nights of sleep. That’s worth everything.”