Eversheds increases competitive advantage with IT transformation and outsourcing partnership

Customer challenge

To meet its goal of being the most client-centred international law firm, Eversheds needs to be able to deliver a consistently high level of quality legal expertise for a predictable cost. Technology is key to achieving this goal, which means Eversheds' IT systems must be both agile and reliable. With thousands of users and IT devices to support globally, maintaining systems agility and availability can be complex and costly.

Computacenter solution

The law firm has outsourced a majority of its core services to Computacenter as part of a five-year contract. As well as providing an onsite service desk and offsite datacenter hosting facilities, Computacenter assists Eversheds with transformational projects, such as a server virtualisation program, Citrix implementation and new application development environment.

Results

The partnership with Computacenter has enabled Eversheds to reduce costs, mitigate risk and increase business agility. Lawyers are now more mobile than ever before, and the firm can provision new client-facing services in a shorter timeframe. This helps to maintain competitive advantage and support Eversheds' goal to be the most client centred international law firm.

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Customer profile

An international law firm for the 21st century
Eversheds is one of the largest full service law firms in the world, with 47 offices across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

The firm's 3,500 people work across five main practice groups: company commercial, human resources, legal systems, litigation and dispute management, and real estate. Eversheds prides itself on providing reliable and consistent services based on predictable costs.

The firm's clients span a wide range of sectors, including aerospace and defence, central and local government, education, energy, food, financial services, industrial engineering, healthcare, retail, TMT and transport. Multi-national clients benefit from a Global Account Management System (GAMS) that can track work in detail and gather valuable management information. Eversheds is committed to being the most client-centred international law firm.

Business challenge

Embedding innovation and ensuring consistent quality of service
To surpass its client expectations and address the changing marketplace, Eversheds must be able to develop innovative and value-for-money solutions that deliver the best service at the best price.

These solutions are increasingly reliant on technology, as Paul Caris, Chief Information Officer (CIO), for Eversheds explains: "IT is crucial to providing innovative solutions to both our lawyers and external clients. GAMS is just one example of how we have used technology to reinvent how we collaborate with our clients, making it easier for them to do business with us."

As well as helping to facilitate innovation and business change, IT is also vital for information-sharing and day-to-day business processes. Conor O'Brien, Head of IT Services and Operations at Eversheds, comments, "To serve our international client base, we need to ensure that our lawyers can access core applications and information from remote locations."

Given the vital role that IT plays in the efficient delivery of client services, Eversheds must ensure that its systems are reliable, agile and cost-effective. "Stability is fundamental; lack of access to systems for just a few minutes could have a significant financial impact on the firm," comments Paul. "We also need to ensure that IT remains aligned with the business as it grows and evolves while containing our costs."

Computacenter solution

Outsourcing partnership provides access to additional expertise
To ensure Eversheds can focus its internal resources on the differentiating elements of IT, the law firm has outsourced a number of core services to Computacenter. "Computacenter is a good cultural match for Eversheds, and has the experience and skills to continuously meet our requirements as the firm and its services evolve," comments Conor.

The five-year managed services contract includes an onsite service desk that supports 3,500 users and offsite datacenter hosting. "Working with Computacenter makes our datacenters easier to control. The environment is robust with excellent provisioning for disaster recovery," comments Conor.

The service desk, which is based in Eversheds' Birmingham office, answers around 10,000 calls a month within an average of 16 seconds. "The Computacenter team provides quick solutions to a range of problems – from password resets to corrupted documents," adds Conor.

Supporting business change and competitiveness, in addition to providing ongoing managed services, Computacenter is also assisting the law firm with transformational improvement projects. For example, Computacenter helped Eversheds implement a virtual server infrastructure as part of the migration to the hosted datacenter facilities.

"As well as achieving a 25:1 server consolidation ratio, we can provision new systems more quickly using virtual machines, which helps to limit the need to invest in new hardware," comments Conor. Eversheds and Computacenter are now working together to create a virtualised development environment that will enable the IT team to test and deploy new applications faster.

A virtual desktop environment based on Citrix technology is also in the pipeline. As Mark Hall, Service Manager for Computacenter, explains, "The Citrix implementation will provide fee-earning staff at Eversheds with greater flexibility by providing remote and secure Web-based access to core applications, including email, document management and digital dictation software."

Collaboration on these and other projects has been aided by Mark's appointment to Eversheds' IT leadership team. This approach will also help enhance service quality and the ongoing relationship between the two companies.

Results

Decreased risk and cost, increased agility and competitive advantage
Although IT is continuing to evolve at Eversheds, the firm has already reaped a number of benefits from its transformational projects. These benefits include:

• Reducing time-to-market for new client services
  
• Keeping pace with business growth and international expansion
  
• Increasing the mobility of its workforce

All these factors are key to maintaining Eversheds' competitive advantage and its reputation as a 21st-century law firm. "The outsourcing partnership means our internal IT team can focus on what's most important – delivering an excellent service to the business and its clients," comments Conor. "Computacenter has helped us think differently about how we manage and deploy technology."

As well as helping Eversheds to differentiate its services in the legal sector, the partnership with Computacenter has:

Mitigated risk: Improved disaster recovery capabilities, specialist datacenter facilities and a rapid response to IT problems all help to minimise the risk of service disruption to Eversheds' clients.

Reduced costs: The agreement with Computacenter includes guaranteed savings of £850,000 over the course of the five-year contract. Computacenter also helped Eversheds renegotiate its Enterprise Level Agreement with Microsoft resulting in £1 million worth of savings over three years.

"By partnering with Computacenter, we have been able to establish a commercial model that contains IT costs while also maintaining a high quality of service and enabling innovation," comments Paul.