case study: Mobility

coMpany: Golden & Walters

location: Lexington, Ky.

eMployees: 50

History: This 15-year-old firm’s nearly two-dozen lawyers practice both civil and criminal litigation. The practice areas include insurance defense, insurance coverage, bad faith litigation, construction law, trucking, products liability, class actions, employment law and general criminal defense.

at a Glance

A Technology PrecedenT

An infrastructure upgrade coupled with the latest mobile and productivity technologies give law firm Golden & Walters a competitive advantage.

Golden & Walters views technology as critical in letting the lexington firm go head-to-head against even the largest firms — from left: senior associate drew Meadows, systems analyst William Washington, Managing partner John Walters and associate Thomas stevens.

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2 case study: Mobility

The Juris advantageGolden & Walters reports significant productivity gains

through the use of LexisNexis Juris.

Juris lets managers at law firms track a variety of business

and legal items: How profitable are the firm’s clients? Is the

firm hitting its productivity targets? Does the firm collect

on a high percentage of the work its lawyers perform? Are

there financial trends or risks that top management should

be aware of?

The software lets lawyers generate visual dashboards,

event-driven alerts and budget forecasting tools. All

reports can be managed through a central interface within

Microsoft Outlook. Reports in Juris are not just columns

and rows of numbers, they can include embedded images,

charts and graphs. Lawyers can also export information into

Excel spreadsheets for further analysis.

Golden & Walters’ senior managers can track the financial

performance of the firm in real time, as well as receive alerts

on items such as cash receipts over or under limit, unbilled

time, cost write-offs, delinquent accounts receivable and

performance rates that fall below specified goals.

For lawyers at Golden & Walters, mobile technology

combined with legal applications let them practice law when

and where they need to — whether in court or on the road.

“We’re a small-to-midsized firm, and the only way we’ll

stay competitive with the larger firms is to be smart in the

way we use technology,” says Golden & Walters Systems

Analyst William Washington.

The Lexington, Ky., firm has about 50 employees, 22

of them lawyers, all of whom are mobile users. A few

lawyers use their own Apple iPad devices, while others use

their own notebooks. Plus, all have Samsung Galaxy S4

smartphones too. The firm’s future plans call for all lawyers

to have Lenovo ThinkPad Twists.

Whether using notebooks or tablets, all the lawyers

access the firm’s systems and data through VMware View

virtual desktops.

Always a willing technology adopter, Golden &

Walters has spent the past few years streamlining its

infrastructure and standardizing on a mobile-friendly

end-user platform. Its technology retooling efforts have

included not only a revamp of the backbone network, but

also a move to end-to-end virtualization, a document

management system rollout and implementation of a legal

business intelligence system.

“Everything we do with technology is with an eye toward

maintaining a competitive advantage,” Washington says.

Given the firm’s small IT department, Washington turned

to its technology partner, CDW, to devise a network and

mobile strategy for the firm.

“The team at CDW were our go-to people for advice on

new products we were considering,” he says. “They carry

such a broad range of products that I was able to get good

information on which networking, security and data backup

products to choose from.”

CDW has a legal solutions team, specifically trained

to understand the unique needs and technology

environments common within law firms, says Shail Shah, a

legal solutions specialist at CDW. This team works directly

with customers, he says.

“Our legal solutions specialists work closely with the

CDW legal sales team to assist customers who have

practice management, case management and e-discovery

needs,” Shah says.

Although Washington did most of the network

configuration and deployment at Golden & Walters, he

says that he depended on CDW to help him sort out which

products to use as he plotted a virtualization initiative

to reduce the firm’s hardware footprint and boost data

security as users moved to mobile platforms.

“A specialist gets on calls with each customer to help

them develop a vendor-agnostic approach to meet their

firm’s needs,” Shah says. There’s no one-size-fits-all

approach; CDW designs a solution strategy for each firm —

based on that firm’s particular business workflow demands

and vision, he says.

700Types of reports supported by Juris, the LexisNexis productivity tool law firms can use to build budgeting and forecasting dashboards and generate event-driven alerts

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staying backed upAs part of its infrastructure upgrade, Golden & Walters also deployed a

new backup system.

The firm has both local and offsite backup processes, Systems Analyst

William Washington says. Local backups are done with Symantec Backup

Exec 2010, with a full nightly backup to a 6-terabyte NetGear ReadyNAS

1500 network-attached storage system.

The firm outsources its offsite backup to a third-party provider that uses

a Veeam product for two-way replication. The replication ensures that

if the main office’s data center goes dark for any reason, users can still

access systems and data hosted at the offsite data center. For further

redundancy, data is hosted at two additional Midwest data centers.

Replication of Lexington data to the main third-party data center occurs

every five hours.

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Making the case for MobileGolden & Walters embraced mobility because it lets

lawyers be more productive than they would be in

an all-desktop environment, says Senior Associate

Drew Meadows.

By example, Meadows recounts how in the past couple

of months, as he rode the train from Lexington to New York

City and back, he worked on his Twist tapping the train’s

Wi-Fi access. Plus, a dictation feature on his Galaxy S4

let him record correspondence that he then was able to

transmit to legal assistants back at the firm.

“Five years ago, I would have wasted time on two travel

days,” he says. “But because of our technology, I was able

to stay productive.”

Embracing technology has been a way of life at Golden &

Walters since it opened for business in 1999, says Managing

Partner John Walters.

The firm pioneered the use of the LexisNexis Sanction

application, litigation presentation software that lets

Golden & Walters lawyers in the courtroom show videos

of depositions and display relevant case documents and

evidence — particularly handy during closing arguments.

The firm has used LexisNexis research tools for several

years, especially for research-intensive insurance and

environmental cases.

“All of these tools are incredibly useful,” Walters says.

plea for a revampWhen Washington began his job at Golden & Walters in

2008, the back-end infrastructure was a hodgepodge of

products — many of them not well integrated. Washington’s

immediate task was to upgrade the network to support the

latest mobile technologies, both hardware and software.

The first step was a network overhaul. Golden & Walters

deployed three switches: two Cisco Systems SGE2010

48-port Gigabit switches, and a Cisco Catalyst 3550 48-

port 2-Gigagit switch that supports Power over Ethernet.

A Cisco ASA 5510 firewall integrated with an intrusion

protection system, along with Trend Micro OfficeScan for

antivirus and an email filter, provide network security.

“My job was to completely rebuild the whole network,”

Washington says. “Server virtualization was also really big

for us. Now I can move a virtual server to a host without

having to take down the network. It all gets done behind the

scenes, and nobody’s work is affected.”

To recoup much-needed office space, Washington

deployed two HP ProLiant DL180 G6 servers to host 10

virtual machines. Each server has about 72 gigabytes of

RAM and two Intel Xeon E5620 processors that have four

cores per CPU at 2.4 gigahertz per core.

Running VMware vSphere 5, the G6 servers connect to

an EMC VNXe3150 storage area network with 4 terabytes

of storage capacity. VMware vMotion lets Washington

easily migrate and provision VMs.

Washington has another HP ProLiant server, an ML110

pedestal with a single Intel Xeon X3330 Dual-Core CPU and

8GB of RAM, set up to provide limited onsite backup and

redundancy. A custom-built server, with two Intel Xeon

E5335 Dual Core CPUs and 20GB of RAM, hosts two virtual

machines that Washington uses as test environments.

The technology differenceA chief benefit of the infrastructure upgrade is

performance. “I’d say we have 1 percent of the reliability

issues we used to have,” Meadows says. “Our firm grew

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case study: Mobility

very rapidly over the past few years, and it was really

important to get all the technology integrated.”

The firm is rolling out a paperless workflow process

using HP iManage.

“The legal world is a very paper-based culture,” Walters

says. “In the past, we used to bring 300 pounds of paper

files into the courtroom for a trial or deposition. A class-

action case requires tens of thousands of documents.”

The long-term goal is to migrate all Golden & Walters

documents to a private cloud that users can access

anywhere from their mobile devices. Currently, the

firm barcodes and scans all documents so that it can

effectively track specific case files and reduce data entry

and filing errors.

“Now, we can pull documents up on a tablet right

there in the courtroom,” Walters says. “While opposing

attorneys are fumbling around with paper documents,

our lawyers are prepared. It’s really improved our

effectiveness.”

Golden & Walters has also recently rolled out

LexisNexis Juris, a legal business intelligence system that

lets lawyers more easily account for billable hours.

Dashboards let lawyers view actual litigation costs

against original projected costs, identify which

clients are profitable and monitor hours spent on

specific tasks.

“It lets us be more proactive versus reactive,”

Walters says. “The dashboards let me see who’s working

on which cases, and it gives me a good overview of what’s

going on at the firm.”

Thomas Stevens, an associate who’s been with

Golden & Walters for about a year, says the emphasis on

technology has made his transition into the workplace

easier.

“During law school, we are all educated on the latest

tools, so it was great to come into the firm and have a ton

of resources right at my fingertips,” he says. “The Juris app

is also very valuable, especially for budgeting my time and

travel expenses.”

Stevens says having a mobile capability increases his

effectiveness.

“It’s great to be at a hearing or a deposition and be able

to bring up the document you need,” he says. “I can also

access email on my smartphone and send over a pleading.

The federal courts have gone to e-filing, and now many of

the state courts are adopting it as well.”

Ultimately, Walters says, technology makes the firm’s

lawyers not only more productive and efficient but also

helps them compete effectively against lawyers from

firms twice or three times the size of Golden & Walters.

“We’ve tried to be in front of technology since we

started,” Walters says. “And we plan to continue down this

path with our goal of going completely paperless.”Pho

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“While opposing attorneys are fumbling around with paper documents, our lawyers are prepared.”— Golden & Walters Managing Partner John Walters

Walters and Washington plan to extend the ability of lawyers to access and manage case files from their mobile devices. “everything we do with technology is with an eye toward maintaining a competitive advantage,” Washington says.

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