Mimecast's SaaS-based Unified Email Management Solution Plays Integral Role in Upgrade for Lathrop & Gage

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The oldest law firm west of the Mississippi River, Lathrop & Gage, is a national law firm that boasts a long tradition of success. Lathrop & Gage has approximately 300 attorneys in 12 offices nationwide, from Los Angeles to New York, and more than 600 total employees.

The Challenge

CIO Ben Weinberger and his IT team build and support the IT infrastructure and services required to keep the firm running smoothly. According to Weinberger, the most important and visible application that his team maintains is email. “Email is the attorneys’ primary mode of communication with clients, even more so than the telephone,” explains Weinberger. “An outage or even a slowdown has immense ramifications.”

When Weinberger joined Lathrop & Gage in 2008, he assessed the firm’s existing email infrastructure and identified anti-spam/anti-virus and business continuity as areas for improvement. Sean Power joined shortly after Weinberger as IT Security Manager and was tasked with making the upgrades.

“We both had experience in managing business continuity solutions, and we thought that the feature set Lathrop & Gage had at the time was very thin, only offering the last 30 days’ worth of email,” recalls Power. “And while the anti-spam and anti-virus software in place performed well most of the time, when we had a problem it was virtually impossible to get any kind of support out of the vendor. You could not get a human on the phone.”

In addition to these needs, Weinberger and Power wanted to modernize the firm’s email archiving practices. Lathrop & Gage needed to archive and preserve every email and ideally wanted to access them quickly from one interface. At the time, the IT staff manually searched through PST files at multiple locations for every eDiscovery request. This process could take days or even weeks to complete.

The Solution

The Lathrop & Gage team chose Mimecast—a fully SaaS-based solution that covers archiving, discovery, business continuity, security and policy management—to address their enterprise challenges. The firm gained archiving, signature management and more through Mimecast’s unified email management product suite in addition to upgrading their anti-spam/anti-virus and business continuity capabilities.

“If we had tried to get those additional capabilities by purchasing them from our previous vendors or another company, it would have cost significantly more and probably not have worked nearly as well,” says Power. “We love the fact that with Mimecast we get everything we need to manage email all in one place.”

Lathrop & Gage’s Mimecast implementation received an accelerated deployment schedule because the firm’s contract with its business continuity vendor was ending. “The implementation was very straightforward thanks to the implementation procedure that Mimecast provides,” observes Power. “It is really one of their strong points.”

The Results

Lathrop & Gage benefited from changing their email infrastructure to a SaaS environment immediately when they were able to retire servers previously dedicated to email continuity and free up significant amounts of storage used to house PST files. Mimecast also delivered on its business continuity features as well.

“Knowing that Mimecast is there all the time and available is a complete game changer from a business continuity point of view,” Power says. “We don’t even have to think about it now. No matter what may happen to our internal infrastructure, as long as our users can get to the Web, they’ll be able to get to their email.”

Power particularly appreciates the administrative interface for Mimecast when it comes to non-repudiation—the ability to know whether an outside party has sent an email message and the disposition of that message. Previously, IT staff had to manually scan logs to find out the disposition of each message. Mimecast alleviates this problem by automatically logging all incoming email and providing an interface to perform searches quickly.

That same interface has considerably eased eDiscovery compliance for Lathrop & Gage. “If an eDiscovery request came in today, it would be easy to find anything potentially relevant and create a report,” states Power. “We did not have the same capability before and this is a significant tool to have access to.”

About Lathrop & Gage, LLP

Founded in 1873, Lathrop & Gage is considered the oldest law firm west of the Mississippi River. In fact, it still represents its first client, Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway (now known as BNSF Railway Company). Lathrop & Gage is well known for client service and diligently seeks to be responsive to each clients’ individual needs and concerns. Lathrop & Gage specializes in 13 core practice areas and more than 25 sub-practice areas.