How Legal IT Can Escape the Graveyard of Recurring Tickets

It’s 3:30 p.m. A partner’s laptop refuses to authenticate to the VDI. The urgent filing is in two hours. The ticket title reads like a headstone you’ve seen a hundred times: “Can’t connect, tried rebooting, please help.” Another “undead” incident claws its way out of the queue. By home time, the backlog becomes a graveyard of recurring tickets, and your team, although brilliant and capable, is exhausted and applying the same fixes again and again.

Legal IT doesn’t suffer from a lack of expertise; it suffers from a surplus of repetition. Service desks in law firms are uniquely pressured by fee earners’ work to meet immovable court deadlines, ensure critical apps function flawlessly, and recognize that every minute of productivity translates to client value. Yet so many desks are trapped in reactive loops, where the same categories of incidents reappear day after day and night after night.

There’s a way out. It’s not another tool to bolt on; it’s a different operating model: Managed Digital Experience Management (Managed DEX). Think of it as moving from ghost-hunting to haunting prevention, systematically closing the pathways that let those incidents rise in the first place.

The Problem: Why Tickets Keep Coming Back from the Dead

In law firms, the usual suspects recur:

• Phantom performance on VDI/Citrix during the morning stampede
• DMS hiccups (iManage/NetDocuments locked files, conflicts, add-in crashes)
• Dictation and speech-to-text gremlins that mysteriously vanish when an analyst screenshares
• Teams meeting and call quality shadows, especially in hybrid setups
• Patch/change backfires that trigger a wave of duplicate incidents
• Outlook add-in poltergeists when one macro setting flips

Each category is predictable. Each one has a pathway to prevention. But detection is fragmented, runbooks are tribal, and improvement cycles happen “when we have time” – which, in reality, we never do.

The pattern is familiar – but it doesn’t have to be inevitable.

Managed DEX re-architects the service desk around three pillars:

Proactive Monitoring that Sees Before It Screams

• Including always-on telemetry from endpoints, VDI sessions, core apps, experience scores, login times, app crash rates, network/jitter, battery health
• Synthetic transactions that open applications, launch dictation, and join Teams meetings to test performance
• “Court day mode” profiles to prioritize and pre-empt performance hotspots on high-pressure days

AI-Powered Runbooks that Auto-Remediate

• Decision trees and automation that recognize signature symptoms (e.g. Outlook + iManage add-in crash after patch)
• Self-healing scripts via Intune/Endpoint Manager, Defender for Endpoint, Power Automate, or RPA. Executed silently when safe; escalated with one click when human input is required
• Knowledge that learns: runbooks update when a fix pattern repeatedly succeeds

Monthly Insights that Drive Continuous Improvement

• A standing DEX Council reviews the top repetitive incidents, root causes, and automation coverage
• Clear ownership: what shifts to automation, what shifts left to L1/L0, what becomes a change to the build, and what needs vendor action
• Targeted comms and nudges to fee earners to prevent reoccurrence (e.g. playbook for “Teams on public Wi‑Fi” with a 30‑second video)

The result isn’t just fewer incidents, it’s a compounding reduction of low-value work that frees your best people to focus on strategic improvements.

Ready to stop fighting the same battles and finally lay those recurring tickets to rest? Book a Managed DEX demo and see how Teneo can help your Legal IT team prevent the next incident from coming back from the dead.

Author: Brett Ayres, CTO, Teneo