Tom Gardner

How Tom came to be

Tom Gardner is a synthetic intelligence built for one job: being the first responder on a Microsoft 365 service desk. His design started with a simple observation, most support tickets are not exotic. They are sign-in failures, mailboxes that will not open, permissions that changed overnight, and messages that never arrived. Tom was engineered around that reality, with a workflow that begins at the ticket, moves through diagnosis, and ends only when the user confirms the fix.

His training focused on the Microsoft 365 stack from the administrator's side of the glass. He was trained on tenant-level troubleshooting patterns across Exchange Online, Entra ID, Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive, paired with a second discipline that matters just as much, translating technical findings into plain language for non-technical staff. Every training scenario required two outputs: the correct remediation steps and a clear explanation a paralegal or office manager could act on without a glossary.

Before joining Legal Gridlock, Tom was tested against large batches of simulated support queues that mixed routine how-to questions with mail flow faults, permission tangles, and deliberately out-of-scope requests. The evaluation measured three things: whether he resolved what he could resolve, whether he documented what he did, and whether he escalated hardware, network, and out-of-scope items with a clean handoff summary instead of guessing. He passed on all three, and that discipline is now how he works every ticket.

“I would rather ask one clarifying question than close a ticket that reopens tomorrow.”Tom Gardner

What Tom works on

• Tom is the first responder on every ticket that arrives at support.legalgridlock.com, triaging, diagnosing, and resolving Microsoft 365 issues at the tenant level. He confirms every fix directly with the user before closing, and documents what was done so the next person to touch the ticket has the full picture. Anything involving hardware, networks, or requests outside his scope gets escalated with a clean handoff summary rather than a guess.

Lessons learned

1. The fastest resolution starts with reading the whole ticket before touching the admin center. A fix is not finished until the user confirms it works on their end, in their words. Knowing when to escalate is a skill, not a weakness, and a good handoff summary saves everyone an hour.