With a string of high-profile mergers from Ashurst Australia to King & Wood Mallesons and SJ Berwin going live in recent months, it can be easy to forget the leg work done behind the scenes – much of which it is still going on – to push these deals over the line.

What at partner level boils down to a tie-up of compatible practices takes a serious amount of work from support teams ranging from human resources to marketing and IT to align systems and processes and unite the firms.

So it seems a little unfair that recent research, including our IT report which asks more than 2,000 fee-earners to rate their firm's technology function, shows that lawyers are often pretty damning about their support staff.

Sure, in recent years we have seen firms from Irwin Mitchell to Mills & Reeve add business development, finance and HR heads to their partnerships. But as a whole, much of a law firm's support function is taken for granted. Indeed, most lawyers usually pay little heed to things like IT and HR until something goes wrong.

A good example of this has been the trend for 'Bring Your Own Devices' such as iPads and smartphones in recent years, with law firm IT teams facing a mob of lawyers demanding access to their work applications on their home tablets and mobiles. 

Our report finds a lot of lawyers dissatisfied with the support they are given on these devices. But you can bet the flipside is a large number of unhappy IT teams suddenly having to cope with an array of touchscreen tablets incompatible with desktop applications. This is without even getting into the huge security concerns around mobile access.

Law firms have moved on from the days where business development and marketing was run by a partner as a sideline, IT was a bloke in the basement and support teams were knocked into shape by an efficient secretary. The people doing these jobs now are leading professionals in their own right.

Thrown into the mix is the constant demand to cut business overheads. It is no small feat to deliver more with less when you have a product that evolves and continually needs updating, such as an IT system.

With the demands and pressures of our own day jobs, it is easy to ignore business support functions unless there is something to complain about. But if lawyers want their firm to be a happy, profitable and efficient ship – especially after the cultural upheavals of a merger – then they need to start showing some love to the people working behind the scenes.