A Private Cloud Success Story

The Law Offices of Regan Associates, Chartered is based in Boston, MA with an office in Washington, DC. The firm provides Group Legal Care to more than 20,000 families, represented by trade unions, and by organizations large and small. This includes many Fortune 500 companies, as well as numerous cities, towns and other municipalities. Notably, the founders of Regan Associates implemented eight of the first nine group legal plans in the United States.

Through its Legal Plans, Regan Associates represents a diverse clientele, including professionals, hospitality workers, police officers, truck drivers, laborers, and service employees. With 13 attorneys and a staff of four, the firm provides Legal Care to the employees of over 150 private and public employers.

As early adopters of legal practice software, the firm began using a DOS-based database system, thereafter making a move to Windows-based Gryphon Legal Software. As their needs grew, and technology evolved, Denise Horan, CFO and Operations Director evaluated available options, including building a custom solution, and ultimately selected Time Matters for its customization options.

Ms. Horan even undertook the unusual step of becoming a Certified Time Matters Consultant so that the firm would have deep in-house customization capabilities. In addition to Time Matters for practice management, the firm also uses PCLaw for billing and accounting.

Ms. Horan led the research into choosing a private cloud service provider. She had narrowed her search when a visit to the Time Matters website revealed that Uptime Legal was in fact a Lexis Nexis partner. “My conversations with Dennis Dimka, Uptime CEO, convinced me that we had found the right product in Uptime Practice,” Ms. Horan said.

A key factor in choosing their cloud service provider was the combination of IT expertise, specific knowledge of law firm operations, and client confidentiality. Of the companies she considered only Uptime Legal had a “Cloud-First, Legal First” approach to providing the service and support the firm required. Beyond merely moving an on-premise based application to a hosted environment, the other advantages of Uptime Practice included:

• No onsite maintenance of software or hardware
• Familiar, easy to use interface, especially by attorneys
• Secure remote access, regardless of location and/or device
• Hosted Exchange email and virus protection
• Dependable support and migration assistance

Ms. Horan had the complete support of the firm’s founder, Paul K. Regan, who appreciated the efficiency increases of a Private Cloud.

Once the decision to move to Uptime Practice was made, the next logical step was to begin migrating the firm’s Time Matters and PCLaw data from the onsite server to the Uptime Practice cloud.

Uptime handled the entire process, and the migration went “much better than I expected,” said Ms. Horan. “In fact, the entire process proceeded exactly as I was told it would,” she added.

Uptime engineers were quickly deployed to assist in creating the secure cloud space, the seamless movement of data, without any impact to existing application usage. The entire system went live quickly. “The Uptime engineers were extremely knowledgeable, and worked to ensure the migration went as scheduled,” Ms. Horan said.

With an impressive list of clients, and a long history of success, Regan Associates needed to consider all the significant impacts of an IT change. The combined efforts of Uptime Legal’s team with guidance from Ms. Horan, made choosing Uptime Practice a logical choice.

By eliminating the overhead of IT costs and combining the confidence of a secure, backed-up cloud deployment, Uptime Practice delivers everything Regan Associates needs today, and provides flexibility for tomorrow.