Case Study
Global Legal Services Enterprise Agency Migrates to Microsoft Azure and Saves Thousands Per Month with Nerdio Manager for Enterprise
About Epiq
Epiq is a global provider of legal services, serving law firms, corporations, financial institutions, and government agencies. They help customers take on large-scale, complex legal tasks and streamline the administration of business operations, class action and mass tort, court reporting, eDiscovery, regulatory, compliance, restructuring, and bankruptcy matters.
The Situation
EPIQ Legal Document Review—Changing with the Times
As a trusted provider of legal services, Epiq works with data that is important, private, and sensitive to its customers. Counted on to handle the legal eDiscovery process for its customers, Epiq must be sure its data is accurate and secure.
Epiq’s legal eDiscovery model helps legal clients, law firms, corporations, government agencies, and others to manage their data and have confidence that the information they have, puts them in a position for the best possible legal outcome.
The sheer volume of sensitive information handled by this enterprise organization is daunting, so costs must be carefully managed, and a large, flexibly sized team needs the right virtual and remote tools to properly complete their tasks in an efficient manner.
Business Needs
- Solve the challenges associated with connecting and managing a large, remote, and constantly changing eDiscovery review team
- Give that team the tools and job-flexibility that the new virtual environment demands
- Overcome the technical challenges associated with security and confidentiality
- Control associated Microsoft Azure costs
Epiq’s document review services staff count fluctuates frequently based on customer demand. Historically, these team members worked in brick-and-mortar facilities. Epiq was already moving to a more flexible work model, even before the seismic changes brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. The task was brought into sharp relief: implement a way for the team to work from geographically distributed locations, with users logging into a virtual desktop environment to perform eDiscovery documentation. Their proof-of-concept project with Microsoft’s Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) revealed that the native auto-scaling in the product was difficult to control, and they needed to explore alternatives to lower costs. The Microsoft team recommended a potential solution; Nerdio Manager for Enterprise.
Epiq’s Document Review Services (DRS) team can onboard and serve hundreds of client document review projects in a year. Usability, flexibility and scalability are key attributes for their technology partners. As team members move quickly from project to project and task to task, Nerdio Manager for Enterprise enables their tech support to keep pace. “Nerdio helps the entire DRS business unit be more
The Solution
The Need for Speed – From Proof of Concept to Implementation
Already moving toward a flexible, virtualized environment, the Epiq team was prompted by the business realities of the COVID-19 crisis. They needed to move quickly, but intelligently, forward with their initiatives. Nerdio became their partner in adding speed and efficiency.
“We were already going down that route, taking things into the cloud, doing document review, hosting virtual machines. COVID forced us to do it immediately,” said Wright.
Although Epiq was initially skeptical of bringing in a third-party solution, the Nerdio team put any anxiety away in short order. “We were really impressed by how easy it was to set up and administer. Especially the auto-scaling functionality,” said Wright. “The Nerdio team really helped us understand what would work best for our use case.”
“The biggest takeaway from all this is how Nerdio helped us increase efficiency and decrease cost in the wake of COVID. It was quick and easy to identify how Nerdio helped us. Looking back, we wish we had pulled the trigger on Nerdio sooner.”
– Drew Wright, Senior Manager of Information Technology, DRS for Epiq
The Results
Saving Time & Significantly Lowering Costs
Epiq evolved its business practices, both to support the document review team with the best technology, but also to respond to that workforce’s need for physical and geographic flexibility.
Wright says, “Nerdio has saved our team countless hours. Time we can spend on other important things — supporting users and acting more strategically.” In a business where time is of the essence, Nerdio proved its worth quickly. As Wright tells it, “Epiq turned a very large workforce virtual in about two weeks. Being able to layer on a tool like Nerdio, and seeing increased functionality, scalability, and significant cost-savings was just invaluable to us.”
Nerdio’s Advanced Microsoft Azure auto-scaling capabilities drove significant monthly savings on Azure storage and compute costs–by about five times, in fact. “What we spend on Nerdio has been offset manifold by the savings. Probably within two weeks, we noticed a significant improvement in cost, because Nerdio was doing what AVD’s standard auto-scaling couldn’t.”
Find Nerdio in the Azure Marketplace: nerdio.co/nme
