Opting to outsource and run its IT infrastructure using Six Degrees’ Next Generation Network (NGN) has enabled UK-based law firm Fisher Jones Greenwood to achieve optimum efficiency and connectivity between all its branch locations and with the cloud. This high level of reliability has supported the company in growing the business and being recognised for its forward-thinking approach to the business of law.
Background
Fisher Jones Greenwood LLP is an award-winning and innovative law firm based in Central London and throughout Essex. With 30 years’ experience and over 160 lawyers, paralegals and support staff, the firm provides a full range of commercial and private legal services.
Ranked in both the Legal 500 and Chambers directories and awarded the ‘Excellence in Technology’ at the 2016 Law Society Excellence Awards, the firm has a progressive, forward-thinking approach to what is now a fast-moving, evolving market. Dedicated to providing the highest levels of customer experience, the firm embraces new technologies, such as a same-day response service and an expansive website and has been one of the area’s fastest-growing firms for over a decade.
Fisher Jones Greenwood’s IT infrastructure needs to be flexible and up-to-date to adapt to this growth. It also needs to be highly-reliable as the firm’s IT is absolutely critical to the everyday running of the firm: everything from digital dictation, case management, compliance and document production to telephony, CCTV and door entry all depend on it.
Peter Carr, Partner and Head of IT at Fisher Jones Greenwood, commented: “Because Six Degrees understands our business and our business needs, they are much more than a provider of communication infrastructure to us: they are a valued strategic partner that obviously listen to their clients. Our inter-office data and voice communication is now extremely reliable with traffic shaped and prioritised via Six Degrees’ platform in order to guarantee quality.”
Challenge
As a rapidly-growing firm with plans to expand into new premises, the team at Fisher Jones Greenwood had to deal with the challenge of getting its IT and telecoms up and running and thus, completely ready for when staff were set to move in.
Carr explained: “Due to a mix of individual suppliers for our network connectivity and telecoms that struggled to work together to create and grow a reliable communications network, problems began to arise.
Branch offices were suffering from connectivity problems, printing was taking a long time, voice traffic was suffering quality issues and the provision of new premises was taking much longer than expected.”
Issues finally came to a head when Fisher Jones Greenwood opened a new office that was connected by a point-to-point network, which failed to perform.
Carr explained: “As a law firm, we need our solicitors to always be available and our IT infrastructure to be resilient; the network we were relying on was simply not meeting this basic expectation. Furthermore, we were also not getting value for our money, so we started to look for a reliable single supplier.”
Solution
Fisher Jones Greenwood engaged with Six Degrees whilst looking for a reliable and cost-effective provider.
Carr explained: “Six Degrees presented the best fit for us as it not only demonstrated abilities to keep up with our growth, but also had a mature portfolio of services that best suited our requirements.”
Six Degrees provides MPLS connectivity and SIP telephony to Fisher Jones Greenwood’s five office locations on the Six Degrees’ Next Generation Network (NGN). Six Degrees L3VPN service addresses Fisher Jones Greenwood’s need for a multi-site solution and to keep traffic flowing 24x7x365. The L3VPN service runs across Six Degrees’ NGN which is completely resilient across the core nodes with the ability to re-route in less than 50 milliseconds.
In addition, Six Degrees enabled Fisher Jones Greenwood to adopt a hybrid cloud solution by providing the firm with Amazon Web Services (AWS) Direct Connect as an extension of the existing MPLS network. The firm has also been able to move its in-house unified threat management system, Redscan, off-premise because Six Degrees can provide direct connectivity via its MPLS network.
Carr commented: “Six Degrees have proved time and again that they are flexible to our needs. The most recent example of this was the seamless third-party integration with Redscan that has brought great benefit to us and our clients.”
Result
Fisher Jones Greenwood and Six Degrees work together to ensure that the firm’s data and voice communications are reliable and efficient, guaranteeing they provide the best service to clients.
Carr concluded: “Because Six Degrees manage all our connectivity for us, provisioning new services and office locations is much simpler. Six Degrees’ end-to-end approach manages the sales, provisioning and circuit handover in a highly-professional manner. This same end-to-end ethos carries through to the NOC teams monitoring our communications network, providing us with early warning to any potential disruption.”
