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case study: Mobility
coMpany: Golden & Walters
location: Lexington, Ky.
eMployees: 50
History: This 15-year-old firm’s nearly two-dozen lawyers practice both civil and criminal litigation. The practice areas include insurance defense, insurance coverage, bad faith litigation, construction law, trucking, products liability, class actions, employment law and general criminal defense.
at a Glance
A Technology PrecedenT
An infrastructure upgrade coupled with the latest mobile and productivity technologies give law firm Golden & Walters a competitive advantage.
Golden & Walters views technology as critical in letting the lexington firm go head-to-head against even the largest firms — from left: senior associate drew Meadows, systems analyst William Washington, Managing partner John Walters and associate Thomas stevens.
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2 case study: Mobility
The Juris advantageGolden & Walters reports significant productivity gains
through the use of LexisNexis Juris.
Juris lets managers at law firms track a variety of business
and legal items: How profitable are the firm’s clients? Is the
firm hitting its productivity targets? Does the firm collect
on a high percentage of the work its lawyers perform? Are
there financial trends or risks that top management should
be aware of?
The software lets lawyers generate visual dashboards,
event-driven alerts and budget forecasting tools. All
reports can be managed through a central interface within
Microsoft Outlook. Reports in Juris are not just columns
and rows of numbers, they can include embedded images,
charts and graphs. Lawyers can also export information into
Excel spreadsheets for further analysis.
Golden & Walters’ senior managers can track the financial
performance of the firm in real time, as well as receive alerts
on items such as cash receipts over or under limit, unbilled
time, cost write-offs, delinquent accounts receivable and
performance rates that fall below specified goals.
For lawyers at Golden & Walters, mobile technology
combined with legal applications let them practice law when
and where they need to — whether in court or on the road.
“We’re a small-to-midsized firm, and the only way we’ll
stay competitive with the larger firms is to be smart in the
way we use technology,” says Golden & Walters Systems
Analyst William Washington.
The Lexington, Ky., firm has about 50 employees, 22
of them lawyers, all of whom are mobile users. A few
lawyers use their own Apple iPad devices, while others use
their own notebooks. Plus, all have Samsung Galaxy S4
smartphones too. The firm’s future plans call for all lawyers
to have Lenovo ThinkPad Twists.
Whether using notebooks or tablets, all the lawyers
access the firm’s systems and data through VMware View
virtual desktops.
Always a willing technology adopter, Golden &
Walters has spent the past few years streamlining its
infrastructure and standardizing on a mobile-friendly
end-user platform. Its technology retooling efforts have
included not only a revamp of the backbone network, but
also a move to end-to-end virtualization, a document
management system rollout and implementation of a legal
business intelligence system.
“Everything we do with technology is with an eye toward
maintaining a competitive advantage,” Washington says.
Given the firm’s small IT department, Washington turned
to its technology partner, CDW, to devise a network and
mobile strategy for the firm.
“The team at CDW were our go-to people for advice on
new products we were considering,” he says. “They carry
such a broad range of products that I was able to get good
information on which networking, security and data backup
products to choose from.”
CDW has a legal solutions team, specifically trained
to understand the unique needs and technology
environments common within law firms, says Shail Shah, a
legal solutions specialist at CDW. This team works directly
with customers, he says.
“Our legal solutions specialists work closely with the
CDW legal sales team to assist customers who have
practice management, case management and e-discovery
needs,” Shah says.
Although Washington did most of the network
configuration and deployment at Golden & Walters, he
says that he depended on CDW to help him sort out which
products to use as he plotted a virtualization initiative
to reduce the firm’s hardware footprint and boost data
security as users moved to mobile platforms.
“A specialist gets on calls with each customer to help
them develop a vendor-agnostic approach to meet their
firm’s needs,” Shah says. There’s no one-size-fits-all
approach; CDW designs a solution strategy for each firm —
based on that firm’s particular business workflow demands
and vision, he says.
700Types of reports supported by Juris, the LexisNexis productivity tool law firms can use to build budgeting and forecasting dashboards and generate event-driven alerts
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3
staying backed upAs part of its infrastructure upgrade, Golden & Walters also deployed a
new backup system.
The firm has both local and offsite backup processes, Systems Analyst
William Washington says. Local backups are done with Symantec Backup
Exec 2010, with a full nightly backup to a 6-terabyte NetGear ReadyNAS
1500 network-attached storage system.
The firm outsources its offsite backup to a third-party provider that uses
a Veeam product for two-way replication. The replication ensures that
if the main office’s data center goes dark for any reason, users can still
access systems and data hosted at the offsite data center. For further
redundancy, data is hosted at two additional Midwest data centers.
Replication of Lexington data to the main third-party data center occurs
every five hours.
800.800.4239 | cdW.com
Making the case for MobileGolden & Walters embraced mobility because it lets
lawyers be more productive than they would be in
an all-desktop environment, says Senior Associate
Drew Meadows.
By example, Meadows recounts how in the past couple
of months, as he rode the train from Lexington to New York
City and back, he worked on his Twist tapping the train’s
Wi-Fi access. Plus, a dictation feature on his Galaxy S4
let him record correspondence that he then was able to
transmit to legal assistants back at the firm.
“Five years ago, I would have wasted time on two travel
days,” he says. “But because of our technology, I was able
to stay productive.”
Embracing technology has been a way of life at Golden &
Walters since it opened for business in 1999, says Managing
Partner John Walters.
The firm pioneered the use of the LexisNexis Sanction
application, litigation presentation software that lets
Golden & Walters lawyers in the courtroom show videos
of depositions and display relevant case documents and
evidence — particularly handy during closing arguments.
The firm has used LexisNexis research tools for several
years, especially for research-intensive insurance and
environmental cases.
“All of these tools are incredibly useful,” Walters says.
plea for a revampWhen Washington began his job at Golden & Walters in
2008, the back-end infrastructure was a hodgepodge of
products — many of them not well integrated. Washington’s
immediate task was to upgrade the network to support the
latest mobile technologies, both hardware and software.
The first step was a network overhaul. Golden & Walters
deployed three switches: two Cisco Systems SGE2010
48-port Gigabit switches, and a Cisco Catalyst 3550 48-
port 2-Gigagit switch that supports Power over Ethernet.
A Cisco ASA 5510 firewall integrated with an intrusion
protection system, along with Trend Micro OfficeScan for
antivirus and an email filter, provide network security.
“My job was to completely rebuild the whole network,”
Washington says. “Server virtualization was also really big
for us. Now I can move a virtual server to a host without
having to take down the network. It all gets done behind the
scenes, and nobody’s work is affected.”
To recoup much-needed office space, Washington
deployed two HP ProLiant DL180 G6 servers to host 10
virtual machines. Each server has about 72 gigabytes of
RAM and two Intel Xeon E5620 processors that have four
cores per CPU at 2.4 gigahertz per core.
Running VMware vSphere 5, the G6 servers connect to
an EMC VNXe3150 storage area network with 4 terabytes
of storage capacity. VMware vMotion lets Washington
easily migrate and provision VMs.
Washington has another HP ProLiant server, an ML110
pedestal with a single Intel Xeon X3330 Dual-Core CPU and
8GB of RAM, set up to provide limited onsite backup and
redundancy. A custom-built server, with two Intel Xeon
E5335 Dual Core CPUs and 20GB of RAM, hosts two virtual
machines that Washington uses as test environments.
The technology differenceA chief benefit of the infrastructure upgrade is
performance. “I’d say we have 1 percent of the reliability
issues we used to have,” Meadows says. “Our firm grew
4800.800.4239 | cdW.com
This content is provided for informational purposes. It is believed to be accurate but could contain errors. CDW does not intend to make any warranties, express or implied, about the products, services, or information that is discussed. CDW®, CDW•G® and The Right Technology. Right Away® are registered trademarks of CDW LLC. PEOPLE WHO GET IT™ is a trademark of CDW LLC. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the sole property of their respective owners.Together we strive for perfection. ISO 9001:2000 certified120829 —130625 ©2013 CDW LLC
case study: Mobility
very rapidly over the past few years, and it was really
important to get all the technology integrated.”
The firm is rolling out a paperless workflow process
using HP iManage.
“The legal world is a very paper-based culture,” Walters
says. “In the past, we used to bring 300 pounds of paper
files into the courtroom for a trial or deposition. A class-
action case requires tens of thousands of documents.”
The long-term goal is to migrate all Golden & Walters
documents to a private cloud that users can access
anywhere from their mobile devices. Currently, the
firm barcodes and scans all documents so that it can
effectively track specific case files and reduce data entry
and filing errors.
“Now, we can pull documents up on a tablet right
there in the courtroom,” Walters says. “While opposing
attorneys are fumbling around with paper documents,
our lawyers are prepared. It’s really improved our
effectiveness.”
Golden & Walters has also recently rolled out
LexisNexis Juris, a legal business intelligence system that
lets lawyers more easily account for billable hours.
Dashboards let lawyers view actual litigation costs
against original projected costs, identify which
clients are profitable and monitor hours spent on
specific tasks.
“It lets us be more proactive versus reactive,”
Walters says. “The dashboards let me see who’s working
on which cases, and it gives me a good overview of what’s
going on at the firm.”
Thomas Stevens, an associate who’s been with
Golden & Walters for about a year, says the emphasis on
technology has made his transition into the workplace
easier.
“During law school, we are all educated on the latest
tools, so it was great to come into the firm and have a ton
of resources right at my fingertips,” he says. “The Juris app
is also very valuable, especially for budgeting my time and
travel expenses.”
Stevens says having a mobile capability increases his
effectiveness.
“It’s great to be at a hearing or a deposition and be able
to bring up the document you need,” he says. “I can also
access email on my smartphone and send over a pleading.
The federal courts have gone to e-filing, and now many of
the state courts are adopting it as well.”
Ultimately, Walters says, technology makes the firm’s
lawyers not only more productive and efficient but also
helps them compete effectively against lawyers from
firms twice or three times the size of Golden & Walters.
“We’ve tried to be in front of technology since we
started,” Walters says. “And we plan to continue down this
path with our goal of going completely paperless.”Pho
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“While opposing attorneys are fumbling around with paper documents, our lawyers are prepared.”— Golden & Walters Managing Partner John Walters
Walters and Washington plan to extend the ability of lawyers to access and manage case files from their mobile devices. “everything we do with technology is with an eye toward maintaining a competitive advantage,” Washington says.
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