Lavan Legal

Background

Lavan Legal was formed on 3 April 2006 when the majority of Perth partners of a national firm recognised a niche in the marketplace for an independent legal practice.

Employing 200 people, the firm is able to offer boutique service levels coupled with a full range of legal services to clients across Western Australia, China and South East Asia.

Situation

Email is a business critical tool for Lavan Legal, not only underpinning responsive client service and efficient collaboration internally, but also in its increasingly important evidentiary role.

“I really do like Mimecast. It’s exactly what a modern product should be. It’s simple and easy and I did not have any pushback from anyone. On top of that, I am not paying any more for email management than I did previously, but get a wealth of benefits that were previously beyond our reach before.”

Marco Marcello - Manager of Information Systems, Lavan Legal

Manager of Information Systems at Lavan Legal, Marco Marcello, explained: “Email is the driving force of legal communication these days, having practically replaced traditional written communication. As a result, it is very important both in terms of client service and as a record of communication relating to every legal matter we deal with.”

However, by mid-2014, increasing email volumes were putting a strain on the on-premise email infrastructure. Email archiving was a particular problem, according to Marco: “Ever increasing on-premises storage demands were one issue, but a lack of functionality was just as concerning. The existing solution had a pretty horrible interface and it didn‘t integrate well with Outlook, so users didn’t like using it.”

In response, users tended to keep emails in their inboxes rather than delete them and rely on archived versions. “As a result, we’d spend a lot of support time dealing with mailbox size limit issues and persuading people to use an archive solution they really didn't like”

On top of that, the archive’s shortcomings were impacting on Lavan Legal’s internal discovery capabilities. Marco said: “Although emails that relate directly to specific legal matters are retained in our document management system, we often need to find indirectly related emails quickly. Because the archive we had in place was clunky and slow, a great deal of time was wasted tracking them down.”

Solution

As something of a cloud innovator in the legal market, Laval Legal was keen to solve these issues and realise additional benefits by moving to a cloud email management solution. Marco said: “We were the first law firm in Australia to adopt cloud-based document management so we’d seen the wider benefits of the model up close. Seeking a cloud solution to our email challenges was a logical next step.”

Marco quickly identified Mimecast as offering a potential solution. “I’d heard about Mimecast, in particular the way it integrated a really strong range of archiving, security and continuity features in a single cloud solution. It sounded like the perfect solution and, because it is cloud based, we could very easily arrange to give it try.”

A proof of concept process was quickly completed and Marco was convinced. A matter of weeks later, Lavan Legal was up and running with Mimecast. Marco commented: “This was as straightforward a business decision as you’ll find. Testing and roll out was just dead easy. We worked with a dedicated Mimecast support contact throughout and their ability to answer our questions, whether straightforward or out of left field, was really impressive.”

Benefits

Mimecast has more than lived up to Marco’s expectations: “I really do like Mimecast. It’s exactly what a modern product should be. It’s simple and easy and I did not have any push back from anyone. On top of that, I am paying no more for email management than I did previously, but get a wealth of benefits that were beyond our reach before.”

For users, the Mimecast Email Archive has been a revelation. Integrated with Outlook, it acts as a bottomless mailbox and makes historical email as easily available as email received five minutes ago. Marco explained: “Users can access every email they’ve ever sent or received, and finding archived email direct from Outlook takes a matter of seconds.”

That ease of use has a range of knock-on benefits for Marco’s team: “Mimecast takes away a whole bunch of other problems for IT. Users are managing their inboxes much better, which protects Exchange performance. The support burden is lower and we don’t need to provide user training, it’s just so easy. That all saves time and money, and allows us to refocus on more strategic activity.”

On top of all that, Marco gets the peace of mind that comes with knowing Lavan Legal’s email system is protected by market leading email security and reliable email continuity.

“These are things users don’t even need to know about, but they obviously bring huge benefits. Continuity means we can run core system updates at the weekend, without preventing people from using email as normal. And I know I am getting better, more robust security that reacts to the latest threats, to keep business critical email safe and secure at all times.”