Virtually every industry is being impacted by the stay-at-home orders caused by the coronavirus, and law firms are not immune. With these orders, legal staff are pushing to stay more connected with each other while being distributed. This brings up new challenges.
In traditional methods, legal staff could easily work together in large office complexes physically sharing documents with one another. Overnight, everyone has become distributed; attorneys, paralegals, and support staff are knocking on IT’s door (virtually) demanding a solution! Before all this happened, many firms were considering a remote workforce solution but didn’t have the time to implement one and, if they did, it wasn’t designed to handle the entire firm.
As we live in uncertain times with COVID-19, the remote workforce concept is the new norm. IT teams must look for simple, secure, scalable, and cost-effective methods for legal staff to collaborate remotely, without any hindrance.
Adjust priorities now or later?
Nobody really knows how long this will last, but according to a survey of 110 in-house general counsel attorneys conducted by Morrison & Foerster LLP, the average impact of COVID-19 on corporations is 7.1 out of 10, where 10 is the most severe impact. This is causing in-house general counsels to shift their priorities with the mindset that the severity impact will decrease over time but not completely disappear.
The report goes on to say that 63% of the respondents have seen an increase in workload due to COVID-19. However, the priorities aren’t the same; there is change from regular business priorities to more immediate concerns.
Source: COVID-19 Impact Survey, Morrison & Foerster,
https://media2.mofo.com/documents/200402-covid-19-coronavirus-impact-survey.pdf
What does this mean? There are many implications, but legal firms will have to watch and react to changes that COVID-19 is causing their clients. For example, according to the report, many of the general in-house counsels are being asked to focus on employment/human resources, contracts, and supply chain distribution as the priorities.
Source: COVID-19 Impact Survey, Morrison & Foerster,
https://media2.mofo.com/documents/200402-covid-19-coronavirus-impact-survey.pdf
This is causing legal firms to rethink their strategies and adapt as well. Legal firms will have to focus on clients’ needs, which means they must be agile across the board. According to Law360, firms are assessing their costs and putting together strategies to handle the pandemic knowing that the effects could last longer than the next quarter. This means that IT teams will have to be equally up for the challenge. They will have to rethink infrastructure solutions to quickly enable remote workers, consolidate datacenter costs, and enable new services without much disruption.
How can you quickly enable remote workers?
To help your staff, it’s good to look at the options available to you. Maybe you already have a remote desktop solution and you just need to scale it out. Nutanix offers easy scalability with virtual desktops so you can keep the business running.
If you don’t have a remote desktop solution, you should look at options for enabling end user computing (EUC) environments. Nutanix has two ways for you to quickly get started. One way is through desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) and another is virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). These solutions enable your organization to deliver new applications using a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, more easily support bring-your-own-device (BYOD) and choose-your-own device (CYOD) initiatives, and increase security from end to end.
Build Flexible EUC Solutions
How can you reduce datacenter costs?
Everyone is always talking about how you can easily save money by reducing datacenter costs. However, not many people know how that’s done. Let’s take a look at an example:
Source: https://twitter.com/nutanix/status/1169596122081484801?s=20
We were able to reduce not only power, cooling, and rackspace, but we saved the customer on licensing costs as well. It’s truly amazing to see how the complexity is reduced by going from four full racks down to 6U of space. We did this by enabling the Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution where we combine common datacenter hardware using locally attached storage resources with intelligent software to create flexible building blocks.
These building blocks replace legacy infrastructure consisting of separate servers, storage networks, and storage arrays. Some of the benefits include lower TCO, increased performance, and greater productivity within IT teams.
Reduce datacenter complexity with Nutanix HCI
It’s really easy to get started with Nutanix HCI. You can take a test drive and learn how to quickly deploy VMs, storage, and networking without logging into multiple consoles. With Nutanix HCI, you can jump start your environment and have it running in only a couple hours. There are a lot of benefits to this solution:
- You can start small with typically just three servers (nodes) and scale without limit
- The solution is 100% software that can run on servers from all leading manufacturers
- It supports popular virtualization and containerization software (AHV is included at no additional costs)
- The entire software stack can be managed from a single UI and upgraded in a single click without disruption to the live environment
There are lots of other ways that you can leverage Nutanix software solutions in the comfort of your own home:
- Create department shares, user profiles, and more with Nutanix Files
- Secure your environment using Nutanix Flow
- No longer put off disaster recovery solutions using Nutanix Xi Leap
Don’t take my word for it. Listen to how Loeb & Loeb, one of Nutanix’s first legal customers who reduced their datacenter complexity using EUC solutions powered by Nutanix.
If you want to learn more about how legal firms can take advantage of these solutions, please visit nutanix.com/legal.
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