“Gardner Carton & Douglas LLP is a 550 employee legal firm based in the Chicago area. Our principal practice areas include Real Estate, Corporate and Securities, HR Law, Health, Tech Ventures, Litigation, Intellectual Property, Telecommunications, Environmental and Bankruptcy and Corporate Restructuring. Our top priority as a firm is to provide an unparalleled commitment to our clients and, while interacting with our clients, to assure that we bring to the table all of our innovative expertise to provide sound legal solutions.
 
“From a systems perspective, our department’s focus is to provide the information that our lawyers, administrators and paralegals need to conduct their everyday business. Our challenge is to maintain 7x24 systems availability. Our legal staff needs access to their systems day or night. Legal teams will often spend their day in court and then access computers at night to process their work and conduct their research.  In the legal industry, time does equate directly to money.  Think about the hourly rates of lawyers. If our systems were to go down, even for just a few minutes, our lost revenue would quickly run into the tens of thousands of dollars. 

Business Growth Requires Technology Upgrade
“Our number one application is the telephone. Our legal people are constantly on the phone to their clients. We run Voice over IP (VoIP). That means that for our phones to work, our systems have to work. Our number two application is email. Next comes our document management system. Our legal people need instant access to their records. Our clients and our lawyers have come to expect near instant responses to their inquiries.

“We knew we needed a solid technology backbone to support the growth of our business.  Some systems and applications we had in place did not lend themselves to our new mobile business strategy. Our equipment was getting older and we needed to upgrade. Our existing IT vendor was mired in a takeover/merge scenario. I had been through a similar experience several years before with another IT vendor and could not afford any delays while implementing new technology.

“We found IBM to be one of the vendors who was the most responsive to our requests and requirements. We entered into a strategic partnership with IBM. They provided us with state of the art technology, and we provided them with the ability to utilize our firm as a showcase partner. We asked IBM to justify the data center power solution and gave them our functionality requirements. It was the IBM account representative that introduced us to the new mobile concept of the APC InfraStruXure® power and rack architecture.

Service Costs Down, System Mobility and Flexibility Up
“We had been using a large, traditional 3-phase UPS system supplied to us by one of APC’s competitors. We had this UPS lined up against the wall and it was as wide as 10 filing cabinets. With the new rack-based APC InfraStruXure system, all of our power protection resides in just two racks.  With our former 3-phase system, we’d have to pay $7,000 every quarter just to maintain it. With InfraStruXure®, this built in cost has gone away. Our former UPS needed to be powered with what looked like bulky car batteries. With InfraStruXure the batteries and power modules are integrated into the rack.

“Maintaining our former UPS required several hours of work and a team of internal and outside technicians. The InfraStruXure architecture allows our staff to change battery and power modules literally in a matter of seconds.  In addition, with our old UPS, we were very limited regarding automated management capabilities. The APC InfraStruXure system is self-monitoring. It warns us, via a message on our cell phones if the temperature in the room is getting too high. This allows us to head off problematic situations before they occur.   The system also tells us how much power each individual server is drawing. If we wish to execute an orderly reboot of the servers remotely, our network personnel don’t need to spend time coming in from some remote location in order to reboot the server.  We can do a shutdown and reboot at will from any Web browser.

Well Positioned for Future Growth
“The InfraStruXure provides us with a system that is easily and cost effectively scalable.  Our data center is always growing. We need to constantly scale up our legal applications. An application that used to take three servers to manage now takes five servers.  Our application clustering and the redundancy built into our systems also dictates a need for more servers and therefore more scalable power. Small applications rapidly grow up to be big applications.  Now when the growth occurs, we simply add a rack to our InfraStruXure to add servers and the accompanying power.

“With the InfraStruXure in place, we are very well positioned for the future.  Mergers and acquisitions are characteristic of our industry these days; they are a fact of life.  InfraStruXure would make it very easy for us, in a short period of time and at low cost, to absorb incoming applications and accompanying servers if we were to merge with a new firm. We are pleased that the benefits of the APC InsfraStruXure allow us to better service our legal team and our clients.”