‘At a Glance’:
-
UK’s fourth largest legal firm with over 2,300 employees in the UK and Spain
-
Severe flooding disrupts firm’s Sheffield call centre
-
Recovers operations to SunGard Availability Services’ New Elland Recovery Centre
-
Smooth recovery ensures all firm’s SLAs are met despite disruption
-
Now working with SunGard to gain BS 25999 accreditation
www.irwinmitchell.com
About Irwin Mitchell
Irwin Mitchell was established over 90 years ago and is now the fourth largest law firm in the UK, by number of fee earners. The practice has grown significantly in the last 15 years and today it employs more than 2,300 staff - including over 1,000 fee-earners and more than 100 partners. Its office network covers Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds, London, Manchester, Newcastle and Sheffield in the UK, as well as the Spanish cities of Marbella and Madrid. The firm recently merged with Glasgow and Manchester based law firm Golds to create the most diverse supplier of commoditised legal services in the UK. The firm is also the leading personal injury and medical negligence litigation practice in the country,
Irwin Mitchell was one of the first legal firms to be awarded the ISO 9001 Quality Assurance Standard and holds Investor in People accreditation. It was recently awarded ‘National Law Firm of the Year’ at the Lawyer Awards, and is the only organisation to have twice won The Lawyer Magazine's Client Care Award, a national accolade recognising outstanding performance. Since it began its practice in 1912, more than one million clients have benefited from the firm’s advice.
Why business continuity?
Irwin Mitchell has a very sound record in business continuity (BC) planning. It has worked with SunGard Availability Services, the pioneer and leading supplier of Information Availability solutions, for several years to ensure that any disruption to its IT or telephony functions is minimised and that all data is kept securely. SunGard provides the firm with both on-site and remote disaster recovery services, depending on the system in questions and the nature of the incident from which it is trying to recover.
Irwin Mitchell has consistently been one of the first legal firms to gain accreditation for industry standards such as BS 7799 and ISO 27001. It is now working with SunGard to ensure that it is fully prepared for the new British Standard for business continuity management (BCM), BS 25999, which comes into play later in 2007.
As with all businesses that operate within the legal industry, Irwin Mitchell has stringent Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in place with all of its clients. For instance, its insurance department is required to call a client within one hour of receiving an instruction. Needless to say, such SLAs must still be met, come fire, flood, power outage or any other business disruption.
Irwin Mitchell has always taken a proactive approach to its BC planning and has worked with SunGard to achieve its Information Availability, assessing how information flows through its business and identifying the data and services which are critical to ongoing operations. This has resulted in the use of Sungard High Availability services for data hosting and Workplace recovery for staff displacement. It was the latter of these services that proved instrumental in the pending recovery crisis.
Irwin Mitchell and SunGard have placed strong emphasis on ensuring the resilience of the firm’s call centre, which takes up to 7,000 calls a day. Telephony recovery is often overlooked by businesses when developing their BCM response but Irwin Mitchell has afforded it a lot of attention to ensure the continued operation of its call centre, at all times and in all circumstances.
Invocation!
In June 2007, Sheffield was hit by severe flooding following some of the wettest weather on record in the UK. On Monday 25th June, Irwin Mitchell’s Sheffield Office, situated across two buildings in the centre of the city, were badly hit by the flooding. The ground floors of both buildings were completely engulfed with water.
Irwin Mitchell’s business continuity team alerted SunGard to the likely danger at around 5pm on the Monday. By 6pm, Gary Thomas, Head of IT Operations, called SunGard to invoke its services and put into action its recovery plan.
Fortunately, the flooding hit the building after the call centre had closed for the evening, but it was now essential for Irwin Mitchell and SunGard to ensure that normal services could be resumed the following morning.
Whilst, SunGard started to action the firm’s recovery plan, the business continuity team worked through the night actioning localised plans to bring a makeshift call centre on line on one of the higher floors of the building. Irwin Mitchell would eventually re-locate around 50 of its contact centre staff to its local SunGard Recovery Centre, based in Elland, West Yorkshire, with the remainder of the team staying in the makeshift facility. Irwin Mitchell was to become the first organisation to use the site in a real invocation following it’s summer launch.
As part of the BC plan, SunGard kept 30 of the IP phones used in Irwin Mitchell’s call centre at the recovery centre in Elland. By 1am on Tuesday morning, SunGard had two recovery suites available, ready with 100 PCs and 30 IP phones. As part of the recovery, SunGard mirrored Irwin Mitchell’s call centre PC systems, so employees would have exactly the same information on screen. SunGard shipped in a further 70 IP phones from its mobile recovery centre in Leicester and by 4am, Irwin Mitchell had access to 100 call centre positions, each of which was identical to those in its own offices. As Gary Thomas says: "To all intents and purposes, the recovery centre became another Irwin Mitchell building."
Keeping staff up to date
Another important part of Irwin Mitchell’s recovery plan was to keep staff updated of developments and to inform them of what they should be doing. The firm had set up a staff information line, a free 0800 telephone number which the company uses in emergencies. This number is a key component of Irwin Mitchell’s crisis management strategy, and is printed on staff ID cards and explained during inductions.
On the morning following the invocation, Tuesday 26th June, everyone knew exactly what they needed to do. Call centre staff were informed that they should travel to work as normal and that they would then be transferred to the SunGard recovery site in Elland by bus. The smooth, fast recovery ensured that the call centre was able to meet its SLAs despite the flooding.
Logistical problems
Irwin Mitchell ended up using only one of the recovery suites put aside for it at Elland as some staff continued to use the boardroom as a makeshift call centre. 50 staff were transferred from Sheffield to Elland and continued to work from the Elland site for over two weeks. This extended duration was necessary as there continued to be on going issues with power whilst the utility companies patched up the city. One of the major challenges for the business continuity team during the invocation was the logistical challenge of transporting staff to and from Elland when all of the local transport networks were severely disrupted due to the flooding.
Thomas notes: "We actually ended up booking hotel rooms for our call centre staff in Elland as it was simply impossible to transport them on a daily basis. What is usually around a 40 minute journey from Sheffield to Elland was taking over two hours. Fortunately our staff were flexible, pulled together and were happy to do what was required in the face of adversity."
A successful recovery
Effective planning, a good IT infrastructure based on Voice over IP technologies and a rapid response by SunGard ensured Irwin Mitchell continued close to normal functioning. Irwin Mitchell Staff at Elland were able to receive client calls and forward them to all corners of the Irwin Mitchell enterprise.
Irwin Mitchell was able to maintain its normal level of service despite the severe floods which caused over £2 million worth of damage to the firm’s buildings. Indeed, it is unlikely that the firm will be able to re-occupy the ground floors of both of its Sheffield buildings before Christmas 2007.
Irwin Mitchell prides itself on the fact that it answers 98 per cent of its calls within 15 seconds. On the day after the floods, this dropped only marginally to 96 per cent, an impressive performance given the circumstances.
As Thomas says, "From an operational and technical point of view, the recovery worked beautifully. Our clients would not have noticed any drop in the level of service and the feedback from our staff has been overwhelmingly positive. Considering that we didn’t invoke until the Monday evening, it was a remarkable feat to be fully operational again for the start of business at 8am the following morning. SunGard delivered a very smooth, professional service: we were in constant contact with its technical team at Elland and they provided us with the expertise and re-assurances that we needed in what was quite a stressful time."
Irwin Mitchell has now relocated its call centre back to an alternative space within its Sheffield offices whilst the flood damaged areas are repaired.
Moving Forward
Irwin Mitchell viewed the success of its recovery from the floods in Sheffield as vindication of its investment and focus on business continuity management.
Thomas remarks: "Business continuity is often something that organisations begrudge paying as it can be hard to see any immediate return on investment. However, our board has always recognised its value and this one invocation gave us that return. Having a clearly-defined BC plan in place helped save the business. The damage we would have sustained otherwise is incalculable."
Irwin Mitchell is now working closely with SunGard towards gaining accreditation for BS 25999, the new British Standard for BCM.
Thomas concludes, "Working with SunGard towards these new industry standards keeps us focused on our Information Availability. This invocation has proved the importance of our availability planning and we are determined to keep working on it as our business evolves."
For more information:
0800 143 413, infoavail@sunhard.com or www.sungard.co.uk
About SunGard Availability Services
SunGard Availability Services is the pioneer and leading provider of information availability solutions, helping to ensure that nearly 10,000 customers in North America and Europe have access to their business-critical information systems. With over 3 million square feet of operations space, SunGard offers a complete range of information availability solutions that include professional services, recovery solutions and managed IT solutions. SunGard provides services to support an always-on production environment, as well as over 30 technology platforms to support customers who require a traditional 24-48 hour recovery time frame. SunGard also has technology and systems management services for application and data centre outsourcing, as well as business continuity consulting services and planning software. Visit SunGard
Availability Services UK at www.sungard.co.uk
SunGard Availability Services (UK) Limited has been recognised as Service Provider of the Year an unprecedented five times in the Business Continuity Awards’ nine-year history, and has been a finalist on all but one occasion: a track record unequalled in the industry. SunGard and its customers have also achieved success in the Most Innovative Product, Most Effective Recovery, Industry Personality, Lifetime Achievement and Consultant of the Year categories, amongst others.
About SunGard
With annual revenue exceeding $4 billion, SunGard is a global leader in software and processing solutions for financial services, higher education and the public sector. SunGard also helps information-dependent enterprises of all types to ensure the continuity of their business. SunGard serves more than 25,000 customers in more than 50 countries, including the world’s 50 largest financial services companies. Visit SunGard at www.sungard.com.
Trademark Information: SunGard and the SunGard logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of SunGard Data
Systems Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. All other trade names are trademarks or registeredtrademarks of their respective holders.