2003
Leader of the pack
By
Kieran Flatt
Legal Week,
24 July 2003
Rather than falling into the trap of purchasing the latest software releases for the sake of it, Masons has concentrated on developing an extremely resilient IT infrastructure. Kieran Flatt reports.
As a law firm that specialises in advising IT companies, one might expect Masons to be the kind of practice that focuses its resources on procurement of the latest gadgets and bleeding-edge software. But far from it. The main focus of the firm’s IT department — for the past four years led by IT director Kevin Connell — has been on developing a highly resilient infrastructure, something that a number of law firms have ignored.
Connell arrived at Masons intent on pursuing a ‘best-of-breed’ strategy. His first move was to migrate the firm’s e-mail system to Microsoft Exchange 5.5, followed by the installation of iManage as a firm-wide document and content management platform. “We always had one eye on where iManage could take us in terms of client extranets, knowledge management (KM) and intranet development,” Connell says.
Masons was also one of the first law firms to adopt Windows 2000. “Whether to stay with NT or to adopt the new best-of-breed system was a serious decision,” Connell says. “We are now really starting to see the benefits in terms of how we manage Exchange; for example we are able to run a ‘rich’ web client.” This was seen as important because Masons has a disproportionately high number of mobile workers for a law firm, which creates training and support issues.
Connell says an important step was using Active Directory to integrate Exchange with iManage, so as to define administrative control across a network encompassing “two islands and one continent”. Already, the work has more than paid for itself, giving the firm the ability to respond faster to changes; lowering data duplication and margins of error and, overall, providing a better service.
Masons has now rolled out a Windows XP desktop across its offices, with Active Directory playing a big role in the management of this roll-out. Looking ahead to the next year, Connell says everything the IT department does will start at an Active Directory level. As well as reducing support costs, XP itself has improved the response time of many applications on the desktop and to further increase speed, the team has completely re-cabled Masons’ London office, he says.
With the benefit of hindsight it is easy to see the wisdom in Connell’s strategy. “Look at how vital e-mail has become,” he points out. “It was a sensible decision to upgrade our e-mail system as a first priority and then — because documents are so important — to put in a content management system.” Another priority has been security, which has driven the replacement of Banyan Vines with Windows 2000, the installation of iPass and a VPN for dial-in and more generally, the adoption of strict, formal procedures to improve security.
The firm has also recently adapted the technology that was already in place to support KM initiatives, specifically its new intranet. It would have been easy to simply go out to market and buy a whole new system, Connell says, but instead the IT department, with help from PA Consulting and Masons’ partnership, built “a very good KM solution” using the Exchange and iManage systems as the platform.
“There are many areas of the firm’s systems that are clearly more stable than they were — such as server infrastructure,” Connell says, “and there are obvious improvements to be had from managed network services.”
According to Connell, Microsoft’s .NET strategy is not a major driver for Masons, as the firm has no commoditised legal services. Web development, such as XML and XSL, will increasingly become an important focus, as within about 18 months Connell sees a requirement for all the firm’s databases to have a data extraction layer. Browser-based applications will deliver know-how to laptops, home workers’ PCs and PDAs.
Going forward, Connell sees mobile and remote working as a key issue — and he says there are new business issues to address from the IT point of view. Fee earners working in both Europe and the US, as a result of recent developments in Masons’ business model, are becoming heavy users of mobile working technology.
While use of the firm’s client extranets remains light — in accordance with norms across the entire legal industry — Connell says Masons has actually won significant pieces of legal work on the strength of these offerings. Given an hour’s notice, the IT department can have a demonstration site up and running in time for a meeting with prospective clients. Connell says this rapid turnaround gives significant business advantage.
Connell says the IT function has benefited significantly from working in conjunction with the firm’s IT outsourcing practice in terms of supplier procurement. “This is an area in which we feel comfortable,” he says.
A year ago, Masons decided to outsource network services and support to Datashare, after working with the supplier on the Windows 2000 project. Datashare now provides an in-house network support team and around-the-clock support for the firm’s critical servers. The wide area network management is also outsourced but with increases in bandwidth and resilience delivering a clear benefit. “Sometimes there may not be cost savings, but you can get a vastly improved service,” Connell says.
Message Labs, a managed service, was adopted last June and the firm has already seen a large reduction in viruses and spam. An additional benefit has been the ability to publish weekly statistics on e-mail usage and performance to the firm’s management.
All this new infrastructure is a symptom of a general hardening of the business focus in IT, Connell says. Masons now has a standard desktop build, template synchronisation, tighter controls on software licensing and distribution and has seen a reduction in support costs. At the same time, the firm’s senior management has become more involved with the decision-making in the IT function and is leading the development of a new know-how system, again based on iManage.
One current project is investigating the best disaster recovery and business continuity solution for the firm, bearing in mind that as well as international offices Masons has six locations around the UK. Streaming data offsite is one option under consideration. Another is using a series of high bandwidth connections between the UK offices to gain resilience — for example, this could enable the firm to stream data between Manchester and Glasgow as part of the disaster recovery strategy.
Clearly, apart from the internal drivers for improved disaster recovery facilities, there is the insurance angle to consider. “Changes in the economy have clearly impacted on law firms,” Connell says. “We are looking at a number of issues where insurers are asking new questions of us and so far we have satisfied their questions with regard to back-up, storage and documentation, which are all key areas.”
E-mail archiving is an important issue going forward. But at Masons there is a parallel issue — the archiving objectives such as regulatory compliance will have to be tied into the wider goal of achieving a “matter centric” view of all documents, including e-mails. “We have been pressing iManage and other key suppliers to integrate their products,” Connell says. “These days you cannot view any of your systems in isolation.”
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