Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Law Firm Cuts Costs, Saves Time with E-Mail–Filtering and Message-Archiving Service
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Legal Services
Customer Profile
Allen Matkins Leck Gamble & Mallory LLP is a large law firm with five offices in California. The firm employs 226 attorneys, who serve clients in real estate, technology, and various other industries.
Business Situation
Much of the firm’s e-mail traffic contained spam and other junk mail, which led to strained bandwidth and lost productivity. The firm also needed a better way to manage its e-mail archives.
Solution
The firm outsourced a hosted spam-filtering and anti-virussolution from Microsoft® Exchange Hosted Services. The firm also recently deployed a hosted e-mail archive component of the solution.
Benefits
Reduced operating costs
Time savings
Outsourced IT management
Ease of use / “This solution has helped us realize cost benefits all the way across the board, whether that’s in hardware, storage, or employee productivity.”
Frank Gillman, Chief Technology Officer, Allen Matkins Leck Gamble & Mallory LLP
Allen Matkins Leck Gamble & Mallory LLP, a 500-person law firm based in California, serves the legal needs of clients in a range of industries. For the past several years, the firm’s attorneys had been using mobiledevices to improve communication with clients. However, these devices, along with the company’s regular personal computers, had become increasingly inundated with spam and other junk e-mail. As a result, the attorneys had stopped using the devices, and the additional network traffic had greatly reduced the company’s bandwidth. To solve these problems, Allen Matkins turned to Microsoft® Exchange Hosted Services to deploy a hosted solution to filter spam, safeguard against viruses, and archive e-mail. Since implementing the solution, the firm has reduced spam-related costs by $400,000, cut junk e-mail by 95 percent, and saved valuable time for its employees.
Situation
Allen Matkins Leck Gamble & Mallory LLP is a 500-person law firm based in California. The firm’s 226 attorneys work out of six offices throughout the state and serve long-standing and new clients in real estate, finance, retail, technology, and a range of other industries.
The firm receives more than four million e-mail messages annually, which are sent directly into the main Los Angeles office and from there are directed to the firm’s four other locations. Several years ago, Frank Gillman, Chief Technology Officer, at Allen Matkins, noticed that 80 percent of all this incoming e-mail traffic consisted of spam and other junk mail. Such a high percentage of junk mail in the network traffic had greatly reduced the firm’s available bandwidth. In fact, Gillman estimated that the firm was spending close to U.S.$17,000 each year for spam-carrying bandwidth. Thirty percent of the firm’s bandwidth was solely dedicated to e-mail, with 54 percent of that being spam and junk mail.
The problem was particularly hard on the firm’s attorneys, who had recently been given e-mail–enabled phones to improve communication with clients. All of the attorneys reported massive daily spam problems, reporting that 7 out of 10 e-mail messages sent to their devices were junk mail. “We invested lots of money in this mobile technology to better communicate with clients, but the devices were basically useless because of the e-mail problems,” says Gillman. “Many of the attorneys just stopped carrying the devices, or they were just leaving them in their desk drawers.” Gillman estimates that spam was costing the firm about $500,000 per year in lost productivity, network storage, wasted bandwidth, and additional end-user support. “Our attorneys were very concerned that some of these e-mail messages might contain attached viruses, so that led to many more user-support questions,” says Gillman. “And we just didn’t have the staff to handle these extra queries.”
The firm decided against deploying an in-house spam filter, realizing instead that it needed a solution that would allow it to identify and eliminate junk mail and spam before they actually reached its e-mail network. In addition, Allen Matkins wanted to provide its attorneys with better tools to search e-mail archives and restore deleted e-mail messages. “We’re a law firm with many technology clients, and they expected us to be experts in technology,” says Gillman. “We needed to find a solution that allowed us to use technology to better advise and service these clients.”
Solution
Allen Matkins contracted with Microsoft® Exchange Hosted Services, a provider of managed services that help address corporate e-mail compliance, security, and availability requirements. The complete line of Exchange Hosted Services includes message archiving, spam and virus filtering, disaster recovery, and e-mail encryption. The company’s solutions, which are designed to remove incoming e-mail threats before they reach corporate firewalls, also support multiple e-mail platforms such as Microsoft Exchange Server.
The law firm’s Los Angeles center contains server computers that run on the Microsoft Windows Server™2003 operating system and the Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 communication and collaboration server, part of Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software. Exchange Hosted Services deployed the Microsoft Exchange Hosted Filtering service, a hosted spam and antivirus service that routes all of the firm’s incoming e-mail messages to the Microsoft Global Data center network. This spam-filtering solution keeps the majority of spam and junk mail from reaching the Allen Matkins network or Exchange Server e-mail servers. “Now all of our e-mail goes through this solution, where it gets sorted and classified, and is then forwarded straight to our Exchange server. From there, it is distributed to us internally,” says Gillman. E-mail messages that are identified as spam can be quarantined at the center network for up to 15 days and routed to a specific user’s mailbox. These messages can also be marked as spam in the e-mail subject header and sent to the recipient.
More recently, Allen Matkins added an additional component to the solution, the Microsoft Exchange Hosted Archive service. This e-mail–archiving piece can store an entire month’s worth of company e-mail securely. It also operates as a backup e-mail system for the firm. Such a component was critical for Allen Matkins, who needed to provide e-mail–archiving capabilities to its attorneys. “We decided to use this part of the Exchange Hosted Services solution because we absolutely had to have an easy way to track the critical intellectual property that’s stored in our e-mail,” says Gillman.
Benefits
After deploying the Exchange Hosted Services spam- and virus-filtering and message-archiving solutions, Allen Matkins was able to reduce spam-related costs by $400,000, or $200 per user per year; reduce IT support calls by 4 percent; and reduce junk mail by 95 percent. The solutions have also helped create more time for attorneys to do their jobs, given the firm an easy-to-use service, and provided it with a complete outsourced solution.
Reduced Operating Costs
Because the Exchange Hosted Services solutions are managed services that require no upfront capital investment, Allen Matkins was able to minimize its overall IT management overhead. And because of the now-reduced load on the firm’s server running Exchange Server, Gillman says the firm has been able to greatly reduce operating costs. “Because we’re cutting down on the amount of e-mail coming in, we can reduce our storage costs and minimize our disaster and business continuity elements,” he says. “The Microsoft service allows us to get the most out of our Exchange servers, and to do more with less.”
In addition, because Allen Matkins attorneys now have to spend less time worrying about junk mail, the firm has been able to cut spam-related costs by $400,000, or $200 per user per year. “We bill by the hour, so any time we can save our people from wasting nonbillable time doing something, that’s clearly to our benefit cost-wise,” says Gillman. “This solution has helped us realize cost benefits all the way across the board, whether that’s in hardware, storage, or employee productivity.”
Time Savings
The solutions have also added critical time to attorneys’ days. Gillman says that before the firm deployed the Microsoft Exchange Hosted Filtering service, users were spending about five seconds handling each piece of spam. “These services have saved us huge amounts of time,” he says. “With all the e-mail coming in, our attorneys have to decide what’s critical and what’s related to specific clients. They then have to put it all into folders and organize it. The Microsoft Exchange Hosted Archive piece gives us quicker search abilities. Because the amount of fake e-mail is reduced and because of the sorting tools that are now in place, the attorneys have instant access to information.”
Gillman says one of the problems his clients face is the amount of time spent searching through e-mail archives. “If you can reduce that time, that saves these companies millions of dollars during this ‘discovery process,’” he says. “Clearly, if we didn’t have this solution, our attorneys would be spending too much of their time organizing their e-mail or searching through their archives.”
Outsourced IT Management
Another advantage of Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services is the fact that Microsoft acts as a complete outsourced IT manager for Allen Matkins. “It’s a very complex task to manage the type and amount of e-mail coming in,” says Gillman. “A company our size doesn’t have the internal resources to do that effectively.” But because Microsoft provides hosted filtering and message- archiving services, Gillman doesn’t need to add IT staff. Also, Allen Matkins no longer needs to spend time or effort on discovering new technologies. “We can rely on Microsoft to bring new technology to our firm and manage the existing technology. It provides peace of mind to us that we didn’t have before.”
Gillman adds that the outsourced relationship helps the firm’s productivity as well. “The e-mail continuity service features within the Microsoft Exchange Hosted Archive service allows our attorneys to work and communicate with clients even if we need to do network maintenance that takes our e-mail server down,” he says. “So our clients actually see us as being up 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and our attorneys can continue working without being burdened by maintenance issues. We couldn’t do that if we were managing this all ourselves in-house.”
Ease of Use
Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services can be deployed quickly. Microsoft sent a short set of instructions to Gillman, who passed them along to his firm’s attorneys. Users can contact Gillman if they have simple questions about the services.
The combined services of the Microsoft hosted solutions have even helped the firm’s attorneys enjoy their jobs more, according to Gillman. “Our people no longer get stressed out about e-mail,” he says. “They feel more comfortable working and can now get the information they need faster.”
Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services
Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services (formerly FrontBridge Technologies) offer an easy-to-use way for enterprises to actively ensure the security and availability of their e-mail environment, while instilling confidence that their e-mail processes satisfy internal policy and regulatory compliance requirements. A seamless extension of Microsoft Exchange Server that operates at the Internet-level, the complete line of services includes hosted filtering for active spam and virus protection; hosted archiving to satisfy compliance requirements and internal policies; hosted encryption to preserve e-mail confidentiality; and, hosted continuity for ongoing access to e-mail during and after disasters. Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services provide value to corporate customers by requiring no upfront capital investment, minimizing IT management overhead, and removing incoming e-mail threats before they reach the corporate firewall.
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