Making SaaS a Success Story – The challenge of an AMLAW Top 50 law firm

The Issue (a Recap):

In the last newsletter, we focused on a top 50 U.S. based law firm with approximately 800 attorneys and a support staff of almost 500. Although the firm has a very strong IT support staff, and utilizes a range of top of the line technology to support their environment, it became clear that the unique needs of the litigation data and the Concordance application was putting more strain and causing more delays than the firm could manage. The challenges they were faced were:

• Slow Concordance performance in some offices
• Application instability
• Application support/maintenance struggles
• Growing data size

The Solution:

As many readers are likely aware, the challenges listed above are not uncommon when deploying Concordance over a Wide Area Network (WAN). These challenges are further complicated by the fact that each case has different requirements, each data set has different characteristics, and each set of users has a unique work process.

The first step in creating a secure Cloud storage or a SaaS environment was to fully understand the users and their different needs:

Users – In this engagement, eDI worked closely with the litigation support department and identified the different functionality needed by their diverse user base. eDI then created a test system and monitored all aspects of the environment to determine the various demands placed on the server, network, database, and other users. This helped create the blueprint for the SaaS solution.

Applications – Next, eDI monitored all the software applications that were being used by the firm. In addition to Concordance, there were numerous other applications that had to work in conjunction with Concordance in order to ensure a proper user experience. Such applications included: Citrix, iPro Image, email server, MS Outlook, MS Office, QuickView Plus, and iPro OCR. eDI also identified several other functions that were consuming resources and negatively impacting performance.

Hardware – Using the information identified by monitoring both user and application activity, we created a hardware environment that was designed to isolate the key functions while at the same time optimizing performance for all users.

The Result:

Once the three items above were completed, eDI rolled out a new hardware and software environment specifically tailored for the firm. This new environment was tested over the course of a month and approved by the firm's litigation and IT staff before an official launch.

The responsiveness of many functions (such as: search, reports, indexing, packing, productions, etc) maintained on eDI's secure cloud network was improved by over 4 times to what they experienced on their own network. Stability was restored and user confidence was again established.