Top Law Firm Gains Better Client Service and Satisfaction from Compuware Vantage

When you're the IT group in charge of system operations for a top law firm in a major market representing 15,000 clients annually, there's no room for error. Ask the IT team members at Honigman Miller Schwartz and Cohn how they minimize the risks, and they'll tell you: Compuware Vantage.

The law firm was founded in 1948 on three basic ideas: "to be available when our clients need us, to complete their work on time and to be responsive." Those founding principles serve the firm well. Today, the organization is one the largest legal firms in Detroit.

When the law firm, like many companies, upgraded from Microsoft Windows 98 to Windows XP, it naturally wanted to avoid any disruptions in service. Honigman COO Michael Gable explains, "Unscheduled downtime of a critical application during the workday that prevents lawyers from providing services to clients can cause lost revenue opportunity on the order of $50,000 an hour."

To maintain uptime and optimal response time, however, takes the right data at the right time, according to Information Services Manager Pat Beesley. "Our attorneys work all hours of the day and night," she says. "If a lawyer is working at home at 3:00 a.m., I need to know our systems are running fine at 3:00 a.m." Beesley just couldn't get that type of assurance from her team's point-in-time analysis. Her team needed a more systematic way of monitoring performance data at any time. After reviewing several competing products, they looked into Compuware. One proof of concept later, and the law firm was sold on Vantage's service management capabilities.

Making the Case for Vantage

When Beesley and her team first took notice of Vantage, they were working on a back-end upgrade for their Microsoft Exchange servers. Prior, the law firm was predominately a Novell environment and relied on built-in monitoring tools to check on system performance. When the firm switched to Microsoft Exchange, the team found it didn't provide the same performance monitoring capabilities.

Network Services Manager Arnold Sese says managing system operations at a law firm can be far different than at corporations. The very nature of conducting legal business and the associated high expectations can add to the overall complexity of business operations. When vendors would show him their products, Sese would be left unimpressed because he rarely saw the promised results in the working environment. "We typically would have to change the way we operate or buy another piece to see any results," he says.

That didn't happen with Vantage. Compuware representatives installed and configured the tool for the Exchange environment. Vantage monitored the availability and performance of the Exchange servers. When an exception occurred, it automatically sent notification to a web-based console. "Right then and there, I knew we were buying Vantage. We didn't need to do anything else to get the promised results-that was so impressive to me," recalls Sese. "We initially invested in Vantage to cover our seven Exchange servers, but because of what I saw Vantage do, I was ready to roll it out to all 90 servers enterprise-wide."

Seeing the value of Vantage sold Honigman on expanding its initial investment within four months.

Uncontested Value

Honigman was saving time and effort with Vantage in no time. In the past, the IT team conducted daily audits of system availability, which meant one member spent fours hours each morning checking consoles by hand for connectivity. "We spent hours everyday doing these point-in-time reports, but when we got calls in the afternoon, we couldn't tell what was wrong. All we knew was when we checked the system in the morning, it was fine," says Sese. "Now we can determine what happened immediately. We have much more accurate reports with instant access to a database of historical and real-time information we never had before. Our audits are much less time-consuming for us."

The IT team at Honigman now puts out performance fires before they impact users. That wasn't always the case with point-in-time analysis. "The only way we were ever alerted to problems was when people called the help desk. As manager of Network Services, I need to know when a service goes down and how to address it before our users are aware of a problem," says Sese. "With Vantage, we get very specific reports on each server and it tells me when a fault occurs, so now we can focus on fixing the problem before the calls come in."

Take, for example, the law firm's Hummingbird DM5 document management system, which attorneys rely on to find, organize and track all legal documents. After the application went enterprise-wide, the server went down at midnight twice in one week. As soon as Vantage identified the problem, it sent the appropriate person an alert to restart the server. "Within five minutes, the server was up and running. We resolved the issue before anyone even noticed, as opposed to coming in at 8:00 a.m. to five voice mails, three e-mails and two pages about the problem. Without Vantage, we just wouldn't be as proactive as we are right now."

Proactive measures like these make Vantage worthwhile to Honigman. In fact, the law firm is currently reviewing the entire Vantage application service management suite for client and network monitoring based on its success with the server monitoring component. With an integrated end-to-end view of performance and availability, Beesley can take client service-and satisfaction-even further.

"My goal is to provide our attorneys and staff with dependable computer service from the office, home or other remote locations," says Beesley, "and Vantage is just the tool we need to continue to provide proactive, on-time service."