COMPANY
Baron & Budd, P.C. is among the largest and most accomplished plaintiffs’ law firms in the country. With more than 40 years of experience, Baron & Budd has the expertise and resources to handle complex litigation throughout the United States.
INDUSTRY
Legal Services
BUSINESS NEEDS
To create an eDiscovery solution.
SOLUTION
- Nutanix Enterprise Cloud – Acropolis, including AHV virtualization – Prism management
- Dell EMC XC Series Appliances
- Nuix & iCONNECT
BENEFITS
- Achieved 20x faster eDiscovery processing, reducing the cost of litigation for clients
- Easily scalable systems provide the agility to accommodate fluctuating workloads
- Reduced cost of eDiscovery by moving the process in house
- Simplified day-to-day management and accelerated completion of IT tasks
- Enabled the firm to provide eDiscovery services to co-council firms
CHALLENGE
Baron & Budd takes pride in remaining at the forefront of litigation, Baron & Budd has spearheaded many significant cases for hundreds of entities and thousands of individuals. Since the firm was founded in 1977, Baron & Budd has achieved substantial national acclaim for its work on cutting-edge litigation, trying hundreds of cases to verdict and settling tens of thousands of cases in areas of litigation as diverse as dangerous pharmaceuticals and defective medical devices, asbestos and mesothelioma, environmental contamination, fraudulent banking practices, motor vehicles, employment, and other consumer fraud issues. Matt Rice is the IT manager at Baron & Budd.
One of the biggest challenges facing the IT team was ensuring high performance for its mission critical eDiscovery solution. “In order to litigate effectively, we must be able to index and search hundreds of millions of documents that come from various sources, essentially finding the ‘needle in the haystack’, while using multiple specialized applications with our back end, Microsoft SQL Server. We process many terabytes of data for our litigation groups, while experiencing significant fluctuations in workload as new cases come in and existing ones are settled,” explained Rice. “Historically the firm used a hybrid approach, using internal resources on our existing infrastructure as capacity allowed and outsourcing overflow. The third-party contracts were expensive, so we were looking for an in–house solution.”
SOLUTION
“The goal was to find a dynamic infrastructure that could be modified quickly at a relatively reasonable cost,” explained Rice. “It wasn’t just about saving money, we wanted to be more efficient with our time as well. We looked at different alternatives, including conventional 3-tier infrastructure and several of the newer hyperconverged solutions.” Rice first heard about Nutanix while attending a Dell World conference a few years ago. “I have a strong relationship with the Dell team and have had excellent experience with their servers,” said Rice. “When Dell suggested that we consider Nutanix Enterprise Cloud software for our eDiscovery infrastructure, we downloaded the Nutanix Community Edition to experience how their software performed. Our team was very impressed with the speed and manageability of the solution.” With the help of Dell Professional Services, Baron & Budd deployed the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud software on Dell servers building the Firm’s first dedicated eDiscovery platform.
Choosing a Hypervisor
“I already had financial approval to purchase VMware hypervisor licenses, so that fact that the AHV virtualization solution is included with Nutanix Enterprise Cloud software for no additional license cost wasn’t the primary deciding factor. The decision came down to functionality. After researching the two virtualization solutions, we couldn’t find any reasons NOT to use AHV. It was the clear winner in terms of simplicity, ease-of-use and administration, and performance.”
Another reason why Rice decided to choose AHV was Nutanix’s commitment to ongoing hypervisor development. “The patching/upgrade schedule that Nutanix has implemented for AHV is impressive. Nutanix is fully committed to AHV, and has made significant, positive changes to the hypervisor over a short period of time,” Rice stated. Another example of Nutanix’s commitment was the test environment we used and their full integration with the Firm’s existing software vendors to ensure the platform would work for Baron & Budd.
RESULTS
20x Faster eDiscovery Processing
“The biggest benefit of Nutanix is its high performance,” noted Rice. “We’ve seen a 20 fold increase in the speed of our eDiscovery processing, meaning we’re able to process 20 times as much data in the same amount of time. Faster access to more data is a key component.”
“Several of our lawyers and legal assistants have commented on the increased speed of our eDiscovery offering,” said Rice. “But the most amazing thing to me, was when I heard our CFO say the word ‘Nutanix’ when talking about the major improvements we’ve made to litigation support. When you hear people that aren’t in IT mention Nutanix by name, it validates the value of the Enterprise Cloud solution.”
“The move to Nutanix is another step in innovation at the firm. Now when we work with other law firms, we can offer our eDiscovery services to the entire team with no hesitation whatsoever. It’s nice to be known as a technology leader when working with our peers.”
Reduced IT Management
“We’ve also realized significant time savings moving to Nutanix and AHV, due to the simplicity of getting specific IT tasks done with Prism,” noted Rice. “With Hyper-V, you have to decide which console to use first. Then, when you get into the console, there are multiple steps have to be performed to manage the environment. With Nutanix and AHV, it is much easier to complete tasks, using the intuitive Prism management interface.”
Lower Litigation Costs Passed Along to Clients
In addition to faster access to data, Baron & Budd has realized significant dollar savings by moving its eDiscovery solution in-house. “Internal eDiscovery costs are significantly lower than outside vendors, so those savings are passed on directly to our clients. Our firm’s slogan is ‘Protecting What’s Right’. Running our eDiscovery solution 20x faster and more cost-effectively with Nutanix is one more way that we protect what’s right by reducing client costs.”
NEXT STEPS
“We were able to use our litigation support deployment as a way to get Nutanix in the door,” noted Rice. “Since then, we’ve migrated several other critical applications onto the platform, including our Citrix XenDesktop environment. We’re now looking to see what other components would be well suited to the Enterprise Cloud. With the tremendous success of our eDiscovery and Citrix projects, we consider Nutanix one of our primary technology partners and look forward to our continued success together.”
Running our eDiscovery solution 20x faster and more cost-effectively with Nutanix is one more way that we’re helping our clients.
Matt Rice, IT Infrastructure Manager, Baron & Budd P.C