With offices in the UK, across Europe and the Middle East, Charles Russell Speechlys’ lawyers work round the clock and require access to confidential legal files and emails at their fingertips. Data is the core asset of the law firm, so if its data is found to be corrupt and cannot be recovered quickly, the company could, compromise billing opportunities, and as a result, will have a direct impact on the reputation of the firm.
One hour of downtime each month costs the average law firm ?45,000 in lost billing over the course of one year (based on 25 lawyers billing at ?150 per hour). Charles Russell Speechlys has more than 500 lawyers putting the risk of lost billing in excess of ?1 million.
During the merger of the two law firms in 2014, hundreds of Virtual Machines (VMs) from Speechly Bircham’s European data centre had to be moved to Charles Russell Speechlys’ combined UK data centre while avoiding downtime, which could impact revenue opportunities and lead to loss of clients’ trust. The IT department was also tasked with the challenge of meeting the merger deadline within three weeks. The implementation of Veeam’s Availability Suite v9 Enterprise Plus helped Charles Russell Speechlys migrate hundreds of VMs successfully, with no downtime, no loss of data and no impact on revenue, within the tight deadline.
Abba Abbaszadi, Head of IT Infrastructure, Charles Russell Speechlys said: “Law firms do not work a normal 9-5 day, lawyers require access to contracts and client documents 24 hours a day, not only in the office but also during court hearings and client meetings, so downtime is never an option. There is increased pressure on the IT department to avoid data corruption and data loss, but also ensure that we can create copies of backups on a daily basis. Since Charles Russell merged with Speechlys Bircham in 2014, Veeam could support the business critical applications during the migration ensuring availability during this challenging period, so updating to v9 was a no brainer. It has given us peace of mind to know that our lawyers can access their legal files at any time, anywhere, as well as prevent potential revenue loss”.
“During the migration we carefully evaluated other options Veeam offered more enhanced features, including consistent backups which is what the business required. The backup and availability solution provides fast, flexible and reliable recovery of critical virtualised applications, such as Worksite, InterAction and BigHand which all support the management of the legal documents the company handles on a daily basis. v9 fits well within the existing infrastructure we have in place.”
Unlimited Scale-out Backup Repository™ (part of Veeam Availability Suite) enables Charles Russell Speechlys’ IT team to ensure availability of data for employees. The solution also allows the department to automatically verify the recoverability of every backup, while Instant VM Recovery lets the team recover business critical applications in a matter of minutes.
Abba Abbaszadi went on to say: “Veeam is a fantastic VM migration solution, although we knew that would be the case because Veeam is a great availability solution. The decision to adopt v9 was easy. It’s easy to use, cost-effective and it saves time. The suite offers complete visibility of the physical and virtual infrastructures and applications, ensuring our team of engineers can proactively identify and solve problems quickly. Veeam is so user-friendly and it’s exceeded our expectations.”
The team at Charles Russell Speechlys was also impressed by the integration of Veeam and ExaGrid. The combined solution offers fast, scalable and cost-effective backup that goes beyond standard disk-based data protection. Charles Russell Speechlys felt confident in being able to get faster backups, as data would land straight to disk, and faster restores from archived data due to a unique and well-architected landing zone within the ExaGrid solution.
Richard Agnew, VP NW EMEA, Veeam Software said: “Reputation and credibility is at the heart of any successful law firm – it is vital that they are Always-On, and that lawyers have their legal documents available at any given moment. With Charles Russell Speechlys going through a merger, we recognised the potential challenges that might occur during the migration, so that we could ensure that the implementation was seamless, and also hassle-free. This allowed the team’s focus on value-added aspects of the merger.”
Charles Russell Speechlys implemented Veeam Backup & Replication v5 in 2010. Since using the solution the team advised each new version of the suite met the firm’s needs, and found that Veeam exceeds its Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to shave hours of time off what could be a laborious process.
