Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/16612
JASON NAJACHT MAYER BROWN LLP Project Atlantic B ecause Mayer Brown is one of the world’s largest law firms, with offices across the globe and lawyers often doing work very far from home, it is imperative that we effectively communicate with each other and our clients at a reasonable cost. Over the last year, Mayer Brown’s main business objectives have been to enhance our communications capabilities worldwide, which we did by building upon a previously successful project at the firm — Project Atlantic. What Project Atlantic did was to establish a forward-looking private network with the capacity to handle all VoIP and video calls between offices in order to eliminate reliance on external vendors. The project’s goals were to reduce business costs, improve remote access solutions and empower end users to work anywhere with full functionality – meaning all applications, all data and all office phone functionality. Over the past year, we have been able to leverage the high-bandwidth, highly available private network of Project Atlantic to reduce the cost of long-distance phone calls and ISDN-usage for videoconferencing by 50 percent. These are both highly critical cost- containment areas, as it is imperative that our lawyers stay in touch with their clients and colleagues across vast geographical distances. Additionally, we continue to pilot different VoIP products, VPN technologies and unified 14 Infrastructure Technologies ILTA White Paper communications platforms to determine an overall strategy in these areas. While we are still in the evaluation and selection phase, we are very confident that we will be able to deliver full office functionality to our users, no matter where they are working. What helped us achieve our objectives were not only the available technologies chosen for implementation, but also the way those technologies were chosen. For the technologies under review, we undertook a great deal of lab testing, product research, vendor demonstrations, matrix comparisons between vendors and training for the IT staff. This allowed us to seamlessly integrate all the different infrastructure technology pieces together in order to deliver quality, reliable, lower cost VoIP and videoconferencing solutions for Mayer Brown. Mayer Brown’s embrace of its high-bandwidth, highly available network allows the firm to leverage it for VoIP in ways that have cut long-distance costs by 50 percent. One of the main drivers behind VoIP is the low total cost of ownership (TCO), and the ability to lower maintenance and management costs. Not only are we using our internal network to achieve office- to-office calling (and avoiding long-distance charges), but we have taken it one step further by implementing Least Cost Routing. This implementation allows users to dial other cities (and countries) and avoid long- distance charges. This is achieved by networking all