Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Law Firm Increases Collaboration, Remote Access with Upgrade of Productivity Tools
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Professional services
Customer Profile
Chicago, Illinois–based Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP is a nationwide commercial law firm with an associated entity in London, England, and 600 attorneys inmore than 50 practice areas.
Business Situation
The firm prides itself on staying at the forefront of technology, so it wanted the most effective productivity tools available for better communication and remote access to information.
Solution
The firm upgraded to Microsoft® Office Professional Edition 2003 after ensuring compatibility with third-party programs.
Benefits
Greater productivity through improved remote access
Enhanced efficiency, communication, and collaboration
Easier IT management
Interoperability with future applications / “As a result of the Office 2003 Edition upgrade, ourattorneys … can be more responsive to client requests, deliver faster turnaround, and handle more clients by being more efficient and organized.”
Alexander Diaz, Enterprise Development Manager, Katten Muchin Rosenman
Law firm Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP needed to improve its remote access and e-mail storage capabilities, and facilitate better communication internally and with clients. The organization upgraded its 1,800 workstations and portable computers to Microsoft® Office Professional Edition 2003, which works with Exchange Server 2003 to give fast and flexible access to e-mail. The attorneys now can communicate more quickly and effectively because they can easily access up-to-date e-mail messages and shared calendars. They also stay more productive by taking advantage of improved organization, integration, and collaboration features across the Microsoft Office System—and that means they can devote more time to clients.
Situation
Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP is a full-service law firm with seven offices across the United States inthe nation’s largest centers of business, government, finance, and technology, and an associated entity, Katten Muchin Rosenman Cornish, in London, England. The firm has 600 attorneys in more than 50 practice areas to serve public and private companies, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations.
Katten Muchin Rosenman maintains a tradition of implementing the latest technology, in part because doing so serves as a powerful competitive differentiator for attracting and retaining clients and attorneys. “We want prospective clients and attorneys to know that we run a progressive, sophisticated practice,” says Alexander Diaz, Enterprise Development Manager for Katten Muchin Rosenman. “We won’t bring in new technology for technology’s sake. But if we identify a business need that a new product or version will support, then we often will participate in product beta tests.”
The firm determined that its attorneys needed better tools for managing the documents, e-mail, and scheduling related to their substantial caseloads. Katten Muchin Rosenman also wanted its attorneys to be able to keep up-to-date while they were out of the office; the firm’s remote users were struggling to keep the e-mail data files on their portable computers synchronized with the files on their workstations.
Synchronization previously had been handled through a virtual private network (VPN), which caused problems because the ports necessary for it to work often are closed by local administrators for security reasons. “Our attorneys need to stay as productive as possible,” says Diaz. “It’s difficult to accomplish their jobs when they can’t get to their email or gain access to all the current information.”
Additionally, Katten Muchin Rosenman sought to improve the way that it dealt with email storage. The firm had standardized on Microsoft® Office XP Professional, but attorneys were overloading their data files in the Microsoft Outlook® 2002 messaging and collaboration client. “Some of our attorneys had a tendency to treat Outlook as ifit were abig filing cabinet, and their personal files were growing up to 12 gigabytes in size,” says Diaz.
Also, Office XP included a 2-gigabyte limitation on offline storage (.ost) files, which was not adequate to meet the needs of Katten Muchin Rosenman attorneys. Therefore, attorneys had to be selective about which folders to keep current and which to store elsewhere, causing time-consuming issues regarding access to information. If an .ost file neared 2 gigabytes, it could become corrupted because it was not designed to handle such a size. As a result, Outlook 2002 often was prevented from opening properly.
The Katten Muchin Rosenman IT staff addressed these recurring issues by creating multiple personal storage (.pst) files and rebuilding corrupted .ost files. But the workaround often required users to open numerous data files to find needed information, which made it difficult to conduct business.
In addition to finding solutions to its e-mail challenges, Katten Muchin Rosenman was interested in taking advantage of any available feature improvements in the latest version of Microsoft Office, especially those that could facilitate collaboration among staff. “Any technology tool that makes it easier for our attorneys to make the most of their limited time is a good investment for us,” says Diaz.
Solution
As a frequent early adopter of technology, Katten Muchin Rosenman was interested in Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 as soon as word got out about the new version. “Microsoft Office represents the core piece of our desktop image because our attorneys are such prolific document producers,” says Diaz. “It made sense for us to upgrade as soon as the Office 2003 Edition became available.”
Katten Muchin Rosenman decided to upgrade its approximately 1,800 workstations and portable computers to Office Professional Edition 2003, but first the law firm addressed potential incompatibilities between Office 2003 and third-party applications. Like most legal firms, Katten Muchin Rosenman uses a large number of third-party products and plug-in applications—including comparison and document assembly tools, a macro suite, and a document management suite—and they needed to be compatible with Office Professional Edition 2003 templates, such as those that help with the automatic creation of letterhead, facsimile cover sheets, and pleadings. The templates help the firm provide users with simple drop-down menus that pull data from one of the firm’s data stores and assist in assuring consistency and accuracy in the creation of documents.
“Our work force relies so heavily on our many desktop applications that we had to get our third-party vendors to verify that their products would work smoothly with the Office 2003 Edition before we rolled it out, which added time to our deployment schedule,” says Diaz.
For the deployment process, Katten Muchin Rosenman built and tested the solution over the course of several months, always looking for potential compatibility issues with any ofthe integrated applications. The core desktop image includes approximately 25 applications, of which 6 have some integration or dependency on Microsoft Office programs. The firm’s IT department conducted several testdeployments in order to streamline and document the process for support staff members who would eventually be in charge of deploying the image.
The IT department worked with one site at a time, training each location’s support staff on procedures, quality control, and support for any issues encountered by end users. After establishing the rollout process, the IT department turned over the deployment effort to that location’s support staff and moved on torepeat the process in the next city.
Having already implemented Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, which is part of Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software, Katten Muchin Rosenman upgraded its desktops in part so that portable computer users can use Cached Exchange Mode to replicate mailboxes to their desktop version of Outlook 2003. Remote users also can use Outlook Web Access, which includes nearly all the features of Outlook 2003, including spelling checker, multiple address books, and easy management of multiple signature files.
Benefits
The upgradeto Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 gives Katten Muchin Rosenman users flexibility when it comes to accessing and managing e-mail and documents, and it also provides tools that will work well with future collaboration applications.
Remote Access for Greater Productivity
From a user perspective, the most significant changes resulting from the upgrade have to do with mobile computing. For example, remote procedure calls over HTTP (RPC overHTTP) provide the firm with the ability to move away from cumbersome VPNs while still allowing remote users to synchronize e-mail over the Internet.
“Approximately 70 percent of our attorneys use portable computers, and they’ve experienced dramatic productivity improvements with Outlook 2003,” says Diaz. “Due to mobility enhancements, our remote users nolonger need smart cards or specialized access points. They can work from anywhere—an airline terminal, a client’s office, or a coffee shop—and have secure access to current e-mail messages, which makes life better for both attorneys and IT staff.”
When combined with Exchange Server 2003, Outlook Web Access offers at least twice the speed of the firm’s previous solution. For full-featured Outlook 2003 use, RPC over HTTP provides secure remote access more easily and cost-effectively than VPNs do. As a result of having the flexibility to use RPC over HTTP and Outlook Web Access, the use of remote access by the firm’s attorneys has increased.
“We want to promote the use of mobile devices such as portable computers at wireless hotspot service locations,” says Diaz. “Using Office Professional Edition 2003 helps give our attorneys as much flexibility as possible to get their e-mail while they’re on the road.As a result of the Office 2003 Edition upgrade, our attorneys have a wider scope of communication options for staying in touch with clients. They can be more responsive to client requests, deliver faster turnaround, and handle more clients by being more efficient and organized.”
Improved Efficiency, Communication, and Collaboration
The expanded remote access capabilities are of enormous benefit to the firm, but Katten Muchin Rosenman attorneys are enjoying new Office Professional Edition 2003 features while in the office as well. “Our attorneys love the new and improved Office 2003 Edition, especially the changes to the Outlook interface,” says Diaz. “The preview pane is enhanced with a bigger section to read, and users can categorize their e-mail messages and create Search Folders and Favorite Folders. By making information easier to organize and sift through, Outlook 2003 has given our attorneys the opportunity to streamline their own processes for greater efficiency.”
Using the shared calendaring in Outlook 2003 also is making a positive difference for Katten Muchin Rosenman users, who no longer need to rely on handwritten notes to establish meetings. The firm plans to integrate its docketing calendar into Outlook so that court appearances, filing deadlines, and other critical dates will appear automatically in attorneys’ Outlook calendars.
To further efficiency, many IT staff members at Katten Muchin Rosenman use the Microsoft Office OneNote® 2003 note-taking program for keeping track of tasks and keeping important information in a single location. “For me, it’s especially helpful for IT project follow-up work because I used to leave multiple legal pads all over the building,” says Diaz. “Now I keep a running list for follow-up work by day and week in OneNote 2003. It provides a safe place that consolidates notes from various meetings and phone calls, and it’s great to be able to paste portions of e-mail messages and task lists into an interface that’s so easy to use.
“We’re also giving OneNote to some attorneys in several of our legal groups to test. Its usefulness to them will be determined by how each practices law, but being able to conduct searches through all their notes for keywords should be a real timesaver.”
Easier IT Management
Because Outlook 2003 does not include the same storage limitations that previous versions had, the Katten Muchin Rosenman IT staff no longer has to spend time responding to issues related to problematic .ost or .pst files. “Our IT department is able to focus on more strategic tasks because Outlook is so stable,” says Diaz.
The Katten Muchin Rosenman IT staff also is finding it easier to manage other Office programs. By using Group Policy settings, the firm’s IT staff can more easily distribute updates to all users in the environment, thus making sure that the firm’s computers all have the same settings and security levels.
“We use Group Policy settings extensively, and each new version of Microsoft Office gives us even more flexibility in controlling our environment, such as the ability to choose which features to turn on or off,” saysDiaz. “We see tremendous timesavings for our IT staff not only due to the added control over security issues, but also due to the expanded centralized management that Group Policy settings provide.”
Interoperability with Future Applications
Katten Muchin Rosenman plans to integrate additional applications with Office 2003 for even greater capabilities. For example, the firm is planning the deployment of Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005, which will give every employee the ability to securely communicate in real time with staff and clients through instant messaging. “Already having the Office 2003 Edition in place within the environment when we deploy Live Communications Server 2005 means that our users will be instantly able to take advantage of the presence capability inherent in the two products,” says Diaz.
Katten Muchin Rosenman is beginning to design its implementation of the Microsoft Windows® SharePoint® Services technology in the Windows Server™ 2003 operating system. “Adding Windows SharePoint Services to our mix of remote access solutions will increase the usability of our information,” says Diaz. “An employee will be able to log on from anywhere and access a SharePoint site that is specific to an individual user or project, is populated with relevant information, and has links to appropriate files.”
By using Windows SharePoint Services, attorneys will have the ability to edit documents with automatic version control for easily rolling back or tracking changes. The integration with Office Professional Edition 2003 will facilitate collaboration among Katten Muchin Rosenman staff because users can view contact information for key people related to the document and use presence functionality to see if real-time collaboration or knowledge exchange is possible.
Katten Muchin Rosenman plans to implement Windows Media® digital rights management (DRM) to add security and other control features to e-mail messages and documents. For example, the firm would be able to prevent an e-mail message from being forwarded or stipulate a life span for aspecific document, making it unreadable after a certain point in time, which is useful for a contract that is valid only if accepted before a certain date.
“Windows Media DRM 10 will provide us with a piece of the security puzzle that hasbeen lacking in our industry,” says Diaz. “Right now, we have to go through the extra step of converting documents into a .pdf or .tif file to prevent readers from making changes to it. With DRM 10, documents can be marked so that, for example, three of four viewers are permitted to edit the document, while the fourth is kept at a read-only status.”
The Microsoft Office InfoPath® 2003 information-gathering program also ranks high on the list of projects to come at Katten Muchin Rosenman. InfoPath 2003 forms will replace the large number of internal forms used by the administrative departments at the firm. Currently, a lot of attorney forms are handled by the firm’s document assembly tool, but the plan is to use InfoPath forms instead to extract data that is stored in the Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 database.
“Combining InfoPath with our other Office 2003 Edition programs will help us accomplish more in a given day,” says Diaz. “For example, InfoPath will help simplify the way that our estate attorneys create wills in that they’ll have faster, easier access to some of the necessary boilerplate text.
“For us, the Office 2003 Edition is the essential foundation that will give us the ability to move in many important directions,” adds Diaz, “from enterprise-class instant messaging to secure digital media use.”
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