Litigation in a cloud

Making SaaS a Success Story – Understanding the Firm's Need for Flexibility

This month's newsletter focuses on a US based law firm with over 250 attorneys and a support staff of nearly 200.  With over 10 offices the Firm uses a number of different litigation packages, with the primary one being the Summation iBlaze product.  Over the last few years, the Firm has struggled to manage the growing amount of client litigation data, requiring the IT department to attempt to build a strategy and budget around its unpredictable and exponentially rising data set.  As a result of the complexities involved and the constant fluctuations in the amounts of data, the Firm saw a dramatic increase in expenses and a drop in its profits per partner. 

In addition to the unpredictability of the data amounts, the Firm also struggled with adjusting their litigation support staff to support the Firm's needs during the many ebbs and flows that coincided with the incoming data. Although these challenges were not a unique problem to this Firm, they found themselves struggling with creating a solution that allowed them to maintain control, provide application and storage flexibility, and keep expenses low.  The Firm ultimately determined that they could save money and headaches by using an outside company that specialized in storing litigation data and litigation software applications.

Challenges

• Implement  a model that can reduce capital costs and increase profits per partner
• Gain a more secure and flexible data storage environment
• Enhance the level of software and data expertise
• Resolve application support and maintenance struggles
• Effectively manage rapidly fluctuating data sizes

In the next eDI newsletter, we will discuss the Cloud Based Solution that was put in place for this Firm in 2011 that allowed them to overcome their challenges and save money in the process.