Winner of UK Law Firm of the Year at the 2018 British Legal Awards, Mills & Reeve employs 1,050 staff in six offices around the UK. For a record 16 consecutive years, The Sunday Times has named the firm as one of the ‘Best 100 Companies to Work For’.

The legal profession has faced many changes in recent years: client expectations, much greater volumes of data, changing work patterns and expectations of talented new hires. However, as IT Infrastructure Manager Dave Bradshaw observes, “We’ve had continual growth even in the face of the 2008 financial crisis and Brexit. The business adapts to situations which would adversely affect more traditional law firms.”

Mills & Reeve’s ability to adapt to demands and expectations is reliant on its IT infrastructure. Bradshaw and his team have used Citrix since 2004, but have recently upgraded to SD-WAN to add bandwidth capacity to help the firm move large volumes of data between the firm’s offices, and to enable its use of video-conferencing and video-based training materials.

The Mills & Reeve team chose to work with Edge7 Networks who proposed a solution using
SD-WAN to get higher bandwidth and greater reliability at lower cost along with improved security.

SD-WAN was a critical component to ensure Mills & Reeve would be successful in its move to Citrix Workspace in the cloud, as Bradshaw explains:

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“Just a few years ago, lawyers would have been dealing with a few Microsoft Word documents. Today, disclosure for a single case could be in the terabytes. That’s a lot of data to move round a network originally designed for a few documents and email.”

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Now, however, “Complaints about a slow network have all gone away. With SD-WAN, we get higher bandwidth and greater reliability at lower cost along with improved security.” 

Overall, Bradshaw says, “Citrix Workspace and SD-WAN are the building blocks of a system that supports our culture of agile and collaborative working. It’s all part of our ethos of achieving more together. IT should be there as an enabler. If people want to work in a particular way, or need to get something done, we should be there to support that. With Citrix, we can focus on doing those more important things and supporting the business.”