Taking a Law Firm to the Cloud

We did a “cloud” project for a client a few years ago that I didn’t realise was a cloud project at the time. The firm was a 45 person legal practice with offices in 2 of Australia’s capital cities. We had done a lot of work with their application systems and brought a lot of productivity improvements in the previous year or so but now the hardware infrastructure was starting to creak at the seams.

At the same of the lease for one of the offices was expiring and there was the potential to rationalise office space, given that headcount had been lowered from the abovementioned improvements in business systems.

To set the scene, the existing hardware infrastructure was in a bit of a mess.

Firstly, the servers had been replaced and virtualised a few years earlier but all that had been done was mapping the previous physical servers into a virtual environment rather than restructuring to a more efficient approach.

The result was that we were running out of space on the main production servers even though there was plenty of space available on the SAN. Fixing it meant a reasonably large project engaging consultants as we didn’t have this type of expertise in house. On top of this the Citrix environment that was in place for one of the offices was very old and creating issues that were addressed in the current version however this was a project in itself as well.

Secondly, while a standard operating environment for the desktop was ostensibly in place, it wasn’t really effective and, as we provided more integrations and productivity tools for the lawyers, we found that we were having to go to each PC to load software. This was because different environments and policies on different machines had evolved over the years. What the user really noticed however was the 1-2 minutes that it took the computer to load once they turned it on in the morning. Once more a sizeable project was required to fix this.

Thirdly, a firm of this size can’t afford to have a big IT department but still have a wide range of technologies to look after. Having all the skills and knowledge in one or two people is a) difficult to achieve, and b) risky, and hence costly, when one of those people moves on for whatever reason.

The result of all this was that we had to do something and our company was commissioned to document requirements and put an RFI to the market place to assess what was available. This was sent to 8 organisations: outsourced management providers (with our servers still in house), companies hosting of our servers through a managed facility as well as Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) or cloud providers (but we didn’t know that’s what they were at the time!).

Interestingly, two firms said they wouldn’t be responding and another said they would be proposing because they were such a great fit, but then didn’t. These companies obviously all had too much work in the middle of the GFC!

In the end we chose one of the IAAS providers as the best fit for our needs. The solution is a standard desktop delivered by a Citrix client with all server infrastructure existing somewhere else (actually data centres in Melbourne and Brisbane). We don’t have our own servers but effectively rent a “slice” of the infrastructure a larger data centre.

Access in the office is through a small LAN that connects via a land line. Out of the office access to the same desktop occurs through Citrix web access. Microsoft licensing, eg. the operating system, Office, Exchange, Sharepoint, SQLServer, etc… is bundled as a part of the monthly cost. Core business applications are installed on the servers and delivered via the desktop.

The business case for the approach was compelling and the saving we saw included:

• Computer room costs – floor space, air conditioning, electricity
• Depreciation costs on the capital equipment: servers, racks, etc…
• Our corporate Microsoft licensing agreement
• ISDN line costs between the 2 offices
• 1.5 heads in staff costs.

In all we calculated the cost savings at approximately $250,000 per annum, a sizeable chunk of cash for the partners of a small firm. With the new environment having been in place for a year and a half, I can confirm that those savings have fundamentally been achieved.

Of course, one consideration for the firm was the risk involved and the partnership was justifiably nervous. Our first port of call was our PI insurance provider and there was a small increase in the premium as a result but nothing of a tangible nature. Next we researched, however we couldn’t find any similarly sized law firm in Australia that had gone down this path. The provider did give us two chartered accounting firms as references and discussions with them proved that they had had a positive experience (and their environment was more complex than ours) and this was some comfort.

In the end, our principal concern was in the provider’s continuing existence and we took some solace that they were a listed company, although that doesn’t necessarily mean a lot these days. The basic view we took was that this was an emerging technology and that this was where the market would be going. We figured that the likely scenario was that the provider would be acquired by a bigger organisation as the market rationalised and this is indeed what happened 12 months later.

So the firm bit the bullet and signed up. A pretty gutsy decision looking back and getting it all happening did have its issues but now it is all settled in they are seeing the benefits, and not just the financial ones above. But that’s a another blog!!