The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/67910
case studies The BYOD Café by Simon Dandy of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer US LLP Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer used BlackBerry devices exclusively in all of its 27 international offices for many years. Over the last decade, the firm consciously embraced standardization across our desktop and mobile platforms and realized the benefits this model provided in terms of efficiency, reliability, in-house knowledge and security. But with the advent of consumerization and users' bring-your-own-device (BYOD) mentality, our information technology department began working on ways to break away from the comfort of enterprise standards, embrace new trends and provide personal device support for our lawyers and staff. In January 2012, the U.S. IT team ran a series of walk-up support sessions for firm employees to bring in their personal devices and get one-on-one help and support. The Brewing of an Idea When the 2011 holiday season was upon us, we knew many of our users would receive new gadgets, and we could foresee that this was only going to increase the already growing demand to use personal devices at the firm. We saw this as an opportunity to embrace our users' newfound enthusiasm for technology. We had also recently released Good for Enterprise to enable secure email messaging on mobile devices, so we needed to make sure users were aware of the newly available capabilities. In preparation, we discussed possible ways to help and support users, and the BYOD Café idea was born! A Place To Start The perfect location to start this initiative was in our New York office, where the local IT team is respected and has a good relationship with staff, giving us the credibility to try something new. Another enabler was that the New York office space has Internet access delivered via a robust Wi-Fi network that could support multiple connections per person. We liked the Apple Genius Bar concept, and we decided to have a support station located in a high-traffic area of the office. With minimal time to make things happen in January, we went from the initial idea to the first session in only 14 days. The Gift of Giving We used these sessions as a chance to dip our toes in the water — we wanted to start conversations with people about BYOD and promote our expertise in this area. We were also conscious of the security implications of using personal devices in a business workflow, so this was a good chance to promote good behavior and compliance with the firm's policies. 44 Peer to Peer