Digital White Papers

I L T A W H I T E P A P E R | T E C H S O L U T I O N S 20 Even the most recent survey released a few weeks prior to the coronavirus pandemic from Thomson Reuters measuring law firm's sentiment to technolo found that overall, law firms did not perceive its value. Before COVID-19, the Survey found the top technolo concern at firms was change and getting users to accept change. Change is no longer the greatest fear. Change--it turns out- -is something we can handle if we are required to. While recognizing that we can handle change, we must also recognize that everything has also not ceased its changing. At the writing of this article, the coronavirus has hit every region of the world and is progressing at a pace that makes the writing of a useful article difficult as reality seems to shift from moment to moment. Law firms have shuttered offices and in New York, D.C. and in other major legal hubs; the National Guard has been called in to those locations to ensure residents shelter in place. Luckily, most firms acted swiftly to implement work from home policies to ensure the health of their attorneys, staff and the community at large. During this part of the transition, mandated work from home is showing lawyers, legal professionals and administrators quickly what futurists have been saying for a very long time-- that, in fact, they do not need to be in special places or in person to deliver legal services. As difficult as this transition is, it is untethering law from a 'place' and allowing technolo to be a conduit of massive change. The lessons we learn will ultimately help the longevity of the profession. Moving to the Full Cloud If your firm was not fully in the cloud prior to COVID-19, one thing users may experience during the transitional phase to working from home is performance degradation. As the number of attorneys and paralegals requesting documents and trying to access content remotely, systems may get overloaded, causing disconnects, versioning issues, and other agita. How you connect to your technolo resources from remote locations dictates realistic performance expectations and capabilities. Within the realm of any given connection type, how the technical components are configured affects end-user performance. The following scenarios are illustrative of this principle. While cloud is not the only way to go, it is the easiest to scale and requires the least amount of ongoing maintenance to ensure resilience. Scenario 1 - Citrix and Remote Desktop Server (RDS) Connections Firm ABC configured a single server to support all attorneys when working nights, weekends, at client sites, and on vacation. The expectation was that less than half of the attorneys would ever be using it simultaneously. When all attorneys and staff began working from home, everyone's performance degraded. Firm ABC doubled the CPU resources "As difficult as this transition is, it is untethering law from a 'place' and allowing technolo to be a conduit of massive change."

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