Simpson & Marwick

Simpson and Marwick is Scotland’s largest specialist litigation and dispute resolution law firm. Headquartered in Edinburgh, the firm has 230 staff spread across four offices in Scotland and a recently established premises in London. Simpson & Marwick had a number of different IT issues that they needed to address and decided to enlist the help of Frontier Technology to provide an innovative and cost effective solution.

The Challenges: Maximum performance without compromising on cost or security

Providing efficient professional services to clients is a must for Simpson & Marwick and the firm felt as if they needed to allocate their legal experts’ time more strategically. Their case management system Visualfiles only allowed one employee to work on a client’s file at a time. This was proving to be a costly method, resulting in senior staff spending too much time performing routine duties- tasks which should have been passed down to lower-paid staff. Simpson & Marwick needed to install a secure, reliable, highly available operating system that allowed multiple users to work on the files at one time.

As a legal practice, Simpson & Marwick is required to possess large amounts of documentation so printing, emailing and scanning are critical. “Printing can cause a host of problems in our business, if someone requests a large document, it saturates the network bandwidth, slowing performance for everyone else. To stay productive, it is essential that bottlenecks do not occur” Bill Oliver, IT Manager explained. The firm needed to find a cost-effective way to control their printing without slowing down the systems performance.

Data security was another major concern, Simpson & Marwick must comply with industry legislation and provide optimal security for its client records. They could not consider remote working options for their lawyers without ensuring that they had a highly secure system.

Our Solutions

After conducting a thorough needs analysis Frontier’s consultants decided to deploy Citrix solutions to solve Simpson & Marwick’s complex IT issues. We firstly upgraded Simpson & Marwick’s existing Citrix environment to the latest version of Citrix XenApp with Microsoft Windows Server. By deploying this solution and interconnecting the firms five offices over a managed MPLS network service, users in their five offices could share information and work on the same case material. The Visulafiles system was shared and accessed between a number of staff, prompting lower paid workers to carry out the routine tasks. This gave their experienced solicitors more timeto focus on bringing cases to a successful and early conclusion.

To reduce printing bottle necks we combined Citrix XenApp with network bandwidth management tools from Packeteer. This allowed part of the company’s network to be completely dedicated to printing, improving Simpson & Marwick’s network performance. Citrix XenApp also provides built-in support for scanning, so that printed documents can be incorporated into electronic case files alongside those already generated internally on computers. This solution supports document sharing and maximises the firm’s investment in Visualfiles.

To enable employees and partners to securely connect to the network at home or at other non-office locations we installed Citrix Access Gateway. The solution matched the firms requirements, offering a high degree of in-built security for its sensitive client records. It ensured that the firm complied with their tight legal industry regulations. “We take security extremely seriously” Oliver noted “Citrix has put us ahead of the game on data security”

The new solutions have provided Simpson & Marwick with a greater return on investment. It firstly improved the firm’s time management capabilities, resulting in legal cases being resolved more quickly. Secondly it enhanced network performance and reliability. Bill Oliver concluded “We are very happy with our solutions. User feedback is that application and data access is fast and reliable, which means that clients are being better served and the business is more productive. We can’t ask for more than that.”