Case Study: Bird & Bird achieves 20x faster document access and 7x bandwidth savings with Riverbed Steelhead WAN optimization

Riverbed Steelhead appliances Reduce Time Taken to Access Mission Critical Applications and Bring Cost Savings to Law Firm

Bird & Bird is a global law firm with about 1,400 staff and 21 offices across Europe and Asia that centralized its document management using Autonomy iManage. The move caused poor application performance over the WAN—some users experienced up to 15-minute delays on searches—while growth in Exchange, SQL and other traffic threatened costly bandwidth upgrades and left distant offices unable to meet the firm’s performance expectations.

Bird & Bird trialed and then deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances (eventually 22 units, plus Riverbed Central Management Console, the Riverbed Services Platform and Steelhead Mobile), removing 10 caching servers and virtualizing local services for smaller offices. The rollout delivered a roughly 20x improvement in file download speeds, a 7x reduction in bandwidth use (deferring upgrades for over three years), rapid ROI in some locations, and faster, more reliable access to mission‑critical documents for lawyers worldwide.

Bird & Bird

Tim Collinson

Information Security Manager