Peer to Peer Magazine

CASE STUDIES Delivering a Virtual Litigation Support Platform by Richard Pachella, Litigation Support Manager at Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough LLP I n any large organization, managing data and applications is a daunting challenge. When you have 12 offices working on the same matters and sharing data, all working under court-mandated deadlines, that challenge is even greater. Nelson Mullins has grown from a small organization to a national law firm with 1,000 users and a presence that spans the eastern seaboard. Lawyers no longer collaborate with their peers down the hallway; instead they work with colleagues across multiple offices to bring the best expertise to their client matters. Instead of having localized teams, as was common in the past, lawyers now work as virtual teams from wherever they are situated. In order to accommodate this shift in the way our lawyers work, we as IT professionals needed to provide them with the tools and technology that would allow them to work from wherever they might be and share and collaborate with their peers. A BROADENING FRUSTRATION The redesign of the litigation technology infrastructure started to take shape from the day I arrived at Nelson Mullins. As I traveled to our various offices and met with attorneys and staff, I found that they were experiencing frustration and difficulty using the existing litigation support tools because access was slow across the WAN. At that time, the applications group was deploying litigation support applications by creating packages and installing to the desktop of a user. This process was cumbersome and time-consuming and, with limited IT resources, the process was not occurring as regularly as it should, so there were version control issues among the various offices. We had a Citrix environment that was being used by some of the remote offices to overcome the latency issues, but a problem arose with this configuration because the Citrix environment lacked attention and the servers were 36 www.iltanet.org Peer to Peer not mirror images of the others. In addition, the applications were either improperly configured or several point releases behind the version installed on some of the users' desktops. It was identified that we needed to re-architect the way our users accessed litigation support applications to support the continued growth of our satellite offices, simplify our upgrade path on applications and provide uniform and consistent access to litigation matters and data, all in a controlled and secure environment. We also wanted to redesign the platform in a way that would prevent us from having to revisit the issue a couple of years down the road as our technology and devices changed. A SOLUTION EMERGES The firm's network manager informed me that he was experimenting with VMware's View and planned to use this technology to replace Citrix as the remote-access platform during the next desktop image refresh. After further discussions, I realized that this might be the solution that would resolve all the challenges we were facing with our current environment. BEGINNING WITH THE BASICS The next step was building a desktop. We started by focusing on only the applications needed for litigation support and left all of the other Nelson Mullins software off the desktop. We did not want users to be confused and think that this was a place to conduct all their firm business. The intent was to control the environment and provide the latest versions of software to match what our clients were using, even if the firm as a whole wasn't working with these programs. For example, when the litigation support VDI was under development, our firm was migrating from Office 2003 to Office 2007, but our external clients had already begun using Office 2010.

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