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Susman Godfrey L.L.P

One of the Leading Litigation Firms Brings Security Solution In-house

Susman Godfrey L.L.P., one of the nations top litigation law firms with employees in Houston, Dallas, Seattle, and Los Angeles, boasts a high-profile client list including an array of fortune 500 companies and government institutions.

The firm, which has been in business for over 20 years, prides itself on its ability to resolve disputes quickly and favorably. Since its inception the firm has recovered over $2.2 billion for its clients.

Winning is constantly top-of-mind for Susman Godfrey lawyers due to a pay structure where compensation often depends on their performance.

Susman Godfrey devotes approximately 60 percent of their time to litigation under agreements that tie compensation to the results they achieve. Working at their own risk and expense requires that the lawyers have efficient work habits while maintaining the highest-quality of service. Susman Godfrey cannot afford to have any downtime or missed deadlines because of network issues.

When Susman Godfrey needed to replace their existing firewall and VPN solutions they considered several vendors including Stonesoft's StoneGate platform. In evaluating their options it was critical that the chosen solution would increase overall uptime and streamline business processes while reducing costs and utilize their plan to add an additional ISP.

Desire to bring a cost-effective solution in-house

Susman Godfrey's existing solution was no longer supported and the firm was tasked with finding the most cost effective replacement that could provide optimal performance. Ideally, the solution would bring IT management of all four offices to one central location in Houston and reduce travel time to local offices for troubleshooting.

Susman Godfrey's existing solution was managed by an outside vendor, removing much of the control from Susman Godfrey's IT department. Anytime there was a performance issue, Susman Godfrey was forced to work with a third-party to correct the problem, often resulting in unnecessary downtime and troubleshooting with financial repercussions. For every minute the firm's employees were unable to access their network the firm's lawyers, partners and more importantly, clients, suffered.

"Because the Stonesoft solution is so user-friendly and easy to understand, we were able to bring all control internal. The user console is easy for almost anyone to console."

- Alexa Haass, IT Director, Susman Godfrey

After evaluating their options the choice was easy for Susman Godfrey's IT director, Alexa Haass. Not only was Stonesoft's StoneGate solution more cost-effective in every way - it was also easier for the firm to support internally.

Another benefit to Stonesoft's solution was its all-inclusive pricing structure. With most other vendors, clients must pay an additional fee for additional benefits whereas StoneGate's pricing is simple and comes standard with all of its enterprise features with no hidden, add-on costs. Alexa Haass, IT Director; Susman Godfrey, said: "Overall, Susman Godfrey was able to spend far less money and end up with a superior solution that was scalable to fit our individual needs."

Other solutions can be very complicated and require the firm's IT department to hire specially trained technicians. StoneGate's enterprise management is intuitive enough that the existing IT staff could support the network 100 percent.

StoneGate allowed Susman Godfrey to bring complete control of their nation-wide network to one, central office.

Implementing a Superior, Scalable and Highly Available Solution

Susman Godfrey was experiencing issues with its single ISP going down so the firm wanted to add a second ISP line when replacing their existing network. At the core of StoneGate is Stonesoft's patented Multi-Link technology that enables a seamless failover and load balancing between multiple ISP lines resulting in increased performance and continuous connectivity even if one of the ISPs fail.

Another unique feature Susman Godfrey took advantage of is StoneGate's active/active clustering and firewall load balancing by having StoneGate clustered in each of their four locations. With this feature every StoneGate appliance is always being used so there is never a standby issue if one firewall has to be taken down for maintenance, eliminating late night or weekend maintenance windows. Also, because each node is active in a cluster, they can capitalize on the benefits of the load balancing firewall performance, which routes traffic to the fasted firewall, eliminating network bottlenecking.

The complete StoneGate system was installed over one weekend with no downtime.

Compelling results

Since the installation, Susman Godfrey has not experienced any downtime with its network. "We are very happy with the new system. It is nice to be more independent and not depend on an outside contractor to know how to run our system. With the new StoneGate solution everything can be controlled from our headquarters by our internal IT staff," said Haass.

"There were no challenges for us in finding the right provider. Once we became familiar with the Stonesoft solution the choice was easy."

- Alexa Haass, IT Director, Susman Godfrey

While Susman Godfrey can still contact Stonesoft's global 24x7x365 support facilities, they have also been assigned a dedicated engineer within Stonesoft to provide support at any time. "Stonesoft is very supportive in everyway. We've never had a problem reaching someone regardless of the time of day or day of the week," said Haass. "Stonesoft's tech support is very knowledgeable and you never have to wait for a question to be answered."

The StoneGate solution provides the performance reliability, control, and support critical to Susman Godfrey's business processes at a minimal cost. This allows the firm to provide the best, most efficient service to their clients without having to worry about networking issues.

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