Case Study: Managed Services

The Company
From emerging growth companies to the Fortune 500, Kilpatrick Stockton LLP, with over 500 attorneys and offices in the United States and abroad, offers proactive, trusted counsel across a wide range of legal services. A close collaboration among attorneys across all practice areas ensures they have the breadth and depth of resources necessary to serve all their clients' needs - from routine legal matters to the most sophisticated transactions.

The Challenge
The firm faced challenges with the management and maintenance of an increasingly diverse group of infrastructure services which included networking, security, server, storage area networks, and telephony. All of this was compounded by the need to continue to offer new and innovative services for its employees and clients, while providing a business continuity plan which would protect the firm in the event of a disaster.

Finding full time employees who possessed the level of expertise, commitment to quality, and customer service had been a challenge. This resulted in an environment operating sub-optimally with unplanned outages affecting the firm’s attorneys and staff.

So the question was:  how could they implement and maintain the tools, technologies and environment needed to improve their clients experience, increase their attorney’s efficiency and billing effectiveness, and protect the firm in the case of a disaster. All this had to be done in a cost efficient manner.  

The Solution
Kilpatrick Stockton LLP turned to iVision’s Managed Services Practice to enter into a shared services model. In this model iVision was able to provide the technical expertise along with deep legal experience and a sophisticated management approach. This led the creation of a full services team that could integrate and operate with every level of the firm from the Managing Partner, to the CIO, Help Desk, paralegal and even outside vendors. iVision has truly integrated with the firm to operate as Kilpatrick Stockton’s infrastructure team.

Additionally, iVision is able to draw upon the expertise of not just the dedicated technical and management team at Kilpatrick Stockton, but the entire iVision team becomes available to Kilpatrick Stockton to provide subject matter expertise when this situation arises. This prevents confusion with multiple execution arms, controls costs through up front price discounts, and even exposes the firm to a level of certification, expertise and shared experience across other legal clients which is unparalleled.

Through this model, iVision has transformed Kilpatrick Stockton into a more stable environment, allowing the firm to focus on the legal business and not the daily management, maintenance and upkeep of IT Operations.

The Result

The results of this partnership have been nothing short of remarkable. By working alongside Kilpatrick Stockton’s talented and dedicated team, iVision has given Kilpatrick Stockton the ability to execute on projects and processes they were never able to do before. Just a sampling of some of the results this partnership has produced includes:

-          iVision successfully consolidated nearly 80% of the infrastructure to a
         virtual platform increasing performance and reliability and providing a
         standardized platform across the enterprise.
-          iVision formulated a business continuity and disaster recovery plan to 
         ensure IT operations of core services in the event of a disaster.
-         iVision deployed a standardized Change Management practice in order to
         stabilize and document the environment.
-          iVision deployed a fully redundant global Wide Area Network.
-          iVision deployed a robust network and service based monitoring.
         environment capable of alerting and self healing IT Operations.
-         iVision deployed network management and archiving solutions to control
         storage growth and support key line of business applications such as the
         document management system and litigation support.
-         iVision deployed an IT Service Catalog which documents all systems and
         provides server, service and operational procedures to ensure continued
         uptime and coordinated recovery in the case of a disaster.

The future is surely bright for Kilpatrick Stockton and iVision. With enhanced services such as VoIP, WAN acceleration, Unified Communications, enhanced rights management, and geographic expansion all in the works. IVision and Kilpatrick Stockton have found a formula which works and the sky is the limit.