Solution Providers Meeting Storage Needs Of Law Firms

The amount, value and type of data that law firms store for themselves and their clients is usually different than that stored in other markets, said Rich Baldwin, president and CEO of Nth Generation Computing, a San Diego-based solution provider.

"Exchange is the most mission-critical application, along with document search and retrieval capabilities," Baldwin said. "That also brings disaster recovery to the top of the list. There are millions of dollars' worth of documents at stake. If the lawyers can access a document, it's the difference between winning and losing a case."

Plus, while companies in other markets limit the size of employees' e-mail archives, law firms often have no restrictions.

"Here, it's unlimited," said Gary Theus, field support supervisor for Thompson Hine LLP, a Cleveland, Ohio-based law firm. "So it continues to grow, grow and grow."

The necessity to store significant amount of e-mail messages and documents leads to gigantic storage infrastructures, said Peter Lesser, managing partner at Kraft, Kennedy and Lesser, a New York-based solution provider that specializes in law offices. Ten to 20 Tbytes of storage capacity is common among law firms, and Lesser said one of his customers is even going beyond that as it begins to back up data over high-speed connections to remote disk storage.

"On day one, they needed 25 Tbytes for production and 75 Tbytes for backups," he said. "That's 100 Tbytes on day one. The three-year projection is for 400 Tbytes."

Disaster recovery is also a large factor for Thompson Hine, Theus said. The law firm adopted its first SAN after 9/11. The company currently backs up its New York and Washington, D.C., office data to Cleveland, and recently started backing up the Cleveland office to Cincinnati. The firm expects to be able to back up the Cincinnati data to Cleveland sometime in June.

Another unique quality about the legal storage market is that much of the equipment firms acquire is for a specific litigation, said Lesser. "If there's a lawsuit involved, the amount of information needed from the rivals is enormous," he said. "It can be many Tbytes for a single case."

The variety of documents that need to be stored and the varying periods in which they need to be accessed make many law firms suitable for tiered storage technology, said Lesser. This includes high- performance drives for Exchange and database files, and lower-cost SATA drives for litigation files.

"If it's an EMC shop, the law firms like the CX series, because they can write to both Fibre Channel and ATA hard drives," he said. "In a Network Appliance shop, they can use a 900-class unit for production and Exchange and database information, and a R200 for litigation."

That type of mixed requirement has resulted in a big demand for information lifecycle management capabilities, said Greg Knierieman, vice president of marketing at Chi, a Cleveland-based solution provider.

"Law firms need to retain information for themselves and for their customers," he said. "There are certain documents lawyers don't want to circulate any longer than needed. And there are others that they want to keep forever."

Another way the law firm vertical is unique is that Novell's Netware operating system historically is very common in this space, said Baldwin. "That creates interesting challenges because Novell is not on the list of tier-one support for storage vendors."

Dealing with law firms' unique storage requirements is one thing. Dealing with the law firms themselves is another.

Validating the need for a storage purchase is key to closing a sale to a law firm, Knierieman said. "IT is not generating revenue," he said. "Every dollar spent on IT is overhead, and comes out of the partners' pockets. So the challenge is being able to demonstrate not just a need for storage, but the ROI involved."

For many law firms, the buying decision is made by the managing partners, not the IT department, said John Zammett, president of HorizonTek, a Huntington, N.Y.-based solution provider.

"It's a group decision," he said. "It takes longer to close. Most firms have an IT manager who gathers information, but the partners make the decision."

In the end, all the hard work that goes into meeting the technology, capacity and ROI needs of law offices can pay off big with new business, said Knierieman.

"Law firms know each other well, and depend a lot on word of mouth," he said.