Solving Storage Issues and Eliminating eDiscovery Challenges with M+Archive
Leading US Law Firm Reaps the Benefits of M+Archive to Meet the High Standards of Their Clients through Highly Available Collaboration and eDiscovery
Executive Summary
Since email was introduced as a business application in the firm in the mid-1990s, the staff of Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith LLP has relied on Novell GroupWise to ensure efficient and secure collaboration. Recently, they deployed M+Archive from Messaging Architects to attain fully automated and compliant email lifecycle management. Prior to the roll-out, the Messaging Architects Professional Services division conducted a comprehensive audit of the email environment to ensure the proper deployment and effective work of the archiving solution. Since the full implementation of M+Archive, the firm’s IS department has already saved time and effort satisfying eDiscovery requests in a matter of hours rather than weeks.
Background
Founded in 1979, Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith LLP is a full service, national law firm with more than 650 attorneys and 23 offices located across the United States. Each of the firm’s offices is dedicated to meeting the challenge of providing their clients with extraordinary service. Since email was introduced as a business application in the firm, Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith LLP has relied on Novell GroupWise to ensure the efficient and secure collaboration of over 1500 end users. Not long ago, they deployed M+Archive from Messaging Architects for a fully automated and compliant email lifecycle management. The Messaging Architects Professional Services division stepped in to guarantee that the email environment was properly set up for the archiving project roll-out.
The Challenges of an Exploding Message Store
Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith LLP have been using Novell GroupWise for collaboration since email was deployed at the firm. Until two months ago, all email resided in the live production environment, including over 1TB of personal archives. It wasn’t surprising that all of the 23 Post Offices were running out of space.
"The situation was getting out of hand,” explains Arthur Leeser, Information Technology Director at Lewis Brisbois Bishaard & Smith LLP. “No matter how robust and reliable an email system, and GroupWise is probably the leader in this respect, there is a point when managing it becomes difficult and risky. Our POs were constantly running out of space. One user had 150 thousand email messages in his inbox; another has a personal message database of over 45GB! We needed to provide a solution that would not only solve the storage issue, but would also allow us to conduct eDiscovery searches and be compliant with email retention requirements as part of the our general document retention policy.”
The IT staff at Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith LLP approached the email arching project comprehensively. First, they defined a global email retention policy for a period of 10 years to apply to all business email in the firm. “Implementing the archiving system helped us impress on our end users that their business email was to be used for business purposes only. They were informed that all correspondence was being archived and that helped us introduce a mechanism to control the volume of email,” continues Leeser.
Solving Storage Issues and Eliminating eDiscovery Challenges with M+Archive
Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith LLP selected Messaging Architects’ M+Archive as the solution that best met the needs for email retention of the law firm. Realizing that the size of their messaging environment could be a problem, Leeser decided to let the Messaging Architects’ Professional Services team help him with the deployment of the solution.
"This was a good decision, since we identified some obstacles that needed to be overcome so the system could archive and index as designed. In the process of resolving some of the issues, I worked with the Messaging Architects’ engineer and developers and they all did a great job understanding my requirements and finding the best solution for what I needed. The professional services engineer in fact helped me tweak my GroupWise Post Offices for optimal results.
In my opinion, in cases such as our when the email message store is very large, organizations should consider engaging the professional services division. These are messaging experts who help you design the most appropriate email policy for your organization and advise you on managing your messaging environment. In addition, they will give you some best practices on getting the most of your email system and show you how to take advantage of the advanced features M+Archive comes with.”
M+Archive has brought serious benefits to the firm’s IS department. “We needed to have an application that would not only archive the email, but that would allow us to find records quickly and easily. In fact, only within the first two months since M+Archive has been in place, I’ve used it twice for eDiscovery. It’s very satisfying that I can retrieve messages from multiple accounts easily and quickly. In the past, such requests would have taken me weeks and I wouldn’t have always been sure that I’d find all the requested data.”
In short, the M+Archive implementation at Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith LLP has been an auspicious investment for the law firm. The GroupWise system has been streamlined and optimized by offloading a huge amount of data to a centralized archive repository. The IS department’s productivity has improved thanks to M+Archive’s extremely fast search engine which allows for flexible and fast eDiscovery searches. The lawyers and their staff can continue to work efficiently without any risks of email downtime or inability to retrieve crucial records that pertain to their cases.
"I cannot say enough about the Messaging Architects’ Client Care division. You guys have done absolutely everything to help us and work with us from extending our trial to giving us tips on how to maximize the performance of our GroupWise system and M+Archive. You were always there and you always followed through.”
