The legal industry is changing. Firms have become global, accessing the opportunity of multinational clients and establishing offices across the world. Information Technology has become a critical factor in a firm's success. Lawyers depend on their networks to access information, collaborate with international clients and co-workers, and to account for their time. The legal profession generates a tremendous amount of digital data in the form of contracts, court filings, exhibits, briefs, and traditional office activity such as email.

In today's competitive environment, law firms cannot afford to have a slow or congested network impacting key engagements. In order to get the most out of each employee's billable hours, IT must provide these employees with efficient ways to share data, collaborate on cases, and use common applications over the wide-area network (WAN).

Riverbed provides the following benefits for firms in the legal industry:

• More efficient file-sharing and collaboration through industry-standard and custom applications. Whether your firm uses a content management package such as Interwoven WorkSite (formerly iManage), DocsOpen, custom applications, or just uses Windows file-sharing and e-mail to communicate, Riverbed's WDS solutions can help accelerate the performance of these applications over the WAN. By providing application-specific optimizations combined with TCP Streamlining and Data Streamlining, significant performance improvements can be realized in data transfers that will reduce the amount of time your staff waits for document retrieval over the WAN. For example, some clients have seen transfer times of 2 minutes reduced to one second for Windows file-sharing transfers. Given that many transfers consist of documents with a small addition of information or a slight revision of contract terms and a version change, Riverbed can dramatically reduce data transfers 60 to 95% by only sending the data that has changed.

Riverbed can also improve the performance of web-based Time, Billing, and Accounting software used in law firms over the WAN, through similar techniques. The less time employees spend accessing and waiting for these applications, the more time they can spend working.

• Consolidated data management. Data control and consistency is critical for law firms. By deploying Riverbed Steelhead appliances, law firms can centralize data stores to ensure security and consistency, while at the same time providing employees anywhere on the network with the fast access to information they need to do their jobs. Lawyers and staff in branch offices can have LAN-like access to data and documents that reside in the data center, and IT can automate data replication from remote offices to data centers, disaster recovery sites, or even other remote offices.

• Reduced bandwidth utilization and consolidated remote IT infrastructure. Riverbed Steelhead appliances eliminate the need for local file servers and local application servers. By optimizing the flow of data over the WAN, IT can still provide LAN-like access to files and applications for employees, while reducing the remote infrastructure and bandwidth needed by remote users. One of Riverbed's customers, a managed service provider to the legal industry headquartered in New York, has deployed Riverbed's Steelhead appliances on their hosted network, as well as at a number of their law firm clients' networks. In one case, the client had been paying for three T1 lines from their main office into the service provider's hosting center in New York City. After deploying Steelhead appliances in the client's offices, they were able to turn off two of the three T1 lines, with no perceptible reduction in performance for the law firm.

  That kind of performance improvement and cost savings is typical. Riverbed offers unparalleled performance increases for both bandwidth reduction and throughput improvement for the most common applications used in the legal and legal services industry.