Location: UK, Bristol
Company: Simmons and Simmons
Simmons and Simmons is looking to recruit a talented and experienced IT Continuity Manager to join the organization’s IT department in the organization’s Bristol office. The primary objective for the post holder is to work with other key senior stakeholders to ensure the resilience, continuity, and recoverability of the firm’s global IT services, particularly those supporting critical legal services. The position leads the design and oversight of the firm’s IT operational resilience framework, ensures alignment of the firm’s operational architecture, and supports governance of third-party service providers delivering critical technology services (e.g., cloud platforms, DMS, and collaboration and communication tools).
This role ensures the firm can withstand, adapt to, respond to, and recover from operational disruptions, consistent with best-practice resilience principles and standards.
Job role:
IT service continuity strategy and framework
- Develop, maintain, and continuously enhance the firm’s IT operational resilience framework, ensuring it supports critical legal service delivery.
- Work with service owners to define continuity requirements for systems supporting critical client-facing services, including core DMS platforms, collaboration tools, matter systems, and cloud services.
- Ensure alignment with broader operational resilience strategy, business continuity, and cyber resilience initiatives.
Service mapping and dependency analysis
- Lead detailed mapping of critical business processes and end-to-end IT dependencies: applications, infrastructure, networks, identity systems, data flows, and third-party providers.
- Maintain a service topology documenting where critical services rely on external suppliers or cross-office capabilities.
- Identify and maintain a register of single points of failure, resilience gaps, and risk concentrations.
Scenario testing and technology resilience exercises
- Design and run severe but plausible scenario tests (e.g., cloud outages, DMS unavailability, data centre disruption, and major cyber incidents) to validate resilience against impact tolerances.
- Report testing outcomes, lessons learned, and required remediation to senior leadership.
Governance of third-party service providers
- Support procurement and contract owners, ensuring structured oversight of vendors delivering critical IT services.
- Ensure resilience controls and monitoring extend to cloud, SaaS, and managed-service environments.
Incident response and crisis coordination
- Where required, support incident management during major IT incidents and outages.
- Work closely with cyber security, Service Delivery, and Business Services on integrated response workflows.
- Review lessons learned from major incidents and outages to ensure any required changes are reflected in the IT Operational Resilience Policy.
Policy, standards, and assurance
- Own and update the IT Operational Resilience Policy, collaborating with stakeholders to ensure alignment with other supporting policies and standards related to IT disaster recovery, continuity, backup resilience, supplier resilience, and recovery testing.
- Work with IT owners to ensure continuity and DR playbooks support overarching policies.
- Create an annual assurance programme covering DR tests, vendor reviews, continuity drills, and regulatory-aligned gap assessments.
Stakeholder and leadership engagement
- Partner with Enterprise Risk, Legal Operations, IT, and Practice Groups to align continuity objectives with legal-service priorities.
- Prepare and deliver updates to International Executive Committee and Risk Committee on resilience posture, supplier risk, and capability maturity.
- Advise Partners on client-specific requirements around continuity, resilience, and due diligence responses.