In today’s 24/7 business environment Kennedys has been at the forefront of its sector in adopting new technologies to drive the partnership forward. This is certainly true with its adoption of virtualisation to improve its business agility enabling new services, and even open new overseas offices in the most cost effective way. A Litigation Specialist Kennedys is a global law firm headquartered in the City of London. The firm specialises in litigation and dispute resolution services for a broad range of industries including insurance, healthcare, construction and rail. With over 89 partners and over 500 staff worldwide, its legal experts work from five UK offices, and internationally from Madrid, Dubai, Hong Kong and Auckland, as well as a recently opened office in Sydney. The firm also has an active network of associated offices in Dublin, Karachi, Lisbon, Mumbai, New Delhi, Paris, Santiago, Dubai and Warsaw.

Thinking Global, Acting Local

The IT team at Kennedys is ultimately responsible for ensuring that the firm’s lawyers and partners can access confidential case notes and business critical applications wherever they happen to be working around the world.

Ian Lauwerys, IT Director at Kennedys, stated: “All international IT operations require considerable co-ordination, supporting and monitoring. When our end users are leading figures in law - an industry that places special importance on trust - then the need to deliver on promises and meet high expectations becomes all-important,”

“Planning the opening of a new office in Sydney, Australia, required the deployment of fully integrated IT, but gave our technology team only a few months to deploy a solution,” he added.

The short time frame and long distance added complexity to the new office project. On the one hand, there was a need to ensure that consistent levels of support were available in Australia. On the other hand, setting up several new servers to tight deadlines and hiring IT contractors from the UK to travel with them was prohibitively expensive.

A Virtual Solution

Considering the complexity of the IT challenge, Ian decided to involve virtualisation specialist Intercept. Kennedys had worked previously with Intercept successfully installing its Citrix and back-office applications, Ian knew he could depend on their specialist advice and support.

Ian said: “I knew that Intercept could provide us with the expertise and skills to carry out the job efficiently and to the exacting standards that we demand. But it wasn’t just because of this that I went back to them. The fact is, Intercept always ‘come up trumps’ in terms of making a value-based decision as well as being proactive about knowledge sharing. Our IT team now has additional highly valuable skills.”

Intercept recommended VMware ESX for a scalable, easy-to-manage server farm. Creating a virtual server environment that removed the need for several physical servers.

The virtualisation project involved installing a number of applications in a UK test lab with each specialist application installed and tested in turn. The Kennedys IT team were then able to test the entire suite of integrated systems with specialist skills in the UK.

An image of each server was then copied to tape and couriered to Australia. Installing these virtual servers onto the new system in Sydney simply involved transferring files to hardware prepared by a local IT service provider. Because the entire solution was installed ‘out of the box’, Kennedys high standard of quality and reliability were maintained throughout.

Removing Risk and Cost

The adoption of virtualisation technology has already resulted in huge cost savings by eliminating the need for local application expertise in Sydney. With no need to ship physical equipment, or send specialist skills further savings were realised.

Ian Lauwerys continued: “Intercept’s advice and experience in installing our virtual environments contribute to our IT team’s continual professional development by sharing their expert knowledge. The consultancy services included empowering the Kennedys IT team to understand and take ownership of the virtualisation technologies employed,”

“Intercept helped us meet the demand for a quick roll-out of our IT infrastructure in Australia. They did this with great professionalism, and got the project off the ground and running with minimal disruption to our day-to-day operations. They really added value in terms of all the knowledge sharing, which we benefited from tremendously,” concluded Ian.

Kennedys Legal case study (57K)

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