OpenText Uses AWS to Help Law Firms Manage Large Document Volumes, Onboard Clients Faster

OpenText uses AWS to help law firms discover legal case facts faster, scale to manage a growing volume of legal documents, and onboard new clients in days instead of weeks. OpenText, based in Ontario, Canada, develops and sells information management software as well as online data backup and security services. OpenText runs its Axcelerate eDiscovery solution on Amazon EC2 instances, stores customer data in Amazon S3, and uses Amazon ECS to manage containerized applications.

Law firms today must manage an ever-increasing volume of electronic records associated with litigation, investigations, and regulatory compliance. A single case often involves millions of records comprising multiple terabytes of data that attorneys and staff must review. Many cases are simply too large to manage with existing review staff, tight timelines, and budget pressure from corporate clients. To best serve their clients, firms rely on technology to provide more value to clients, increase attorney efficiency, and compete more effectively by keeping client eDiscovery projects on time and within budget.

For 30 years, OpenText has been delivering mission-critical global solutions across multiple industries. An Amazon Web Services (AWS) Advanced Technology Partner based in Canada, OpenText delivers a comprehensive information management platform and services to provide secure, scalable solutions for global companies, small and medium businesses (SMBs), governments, and consumers around the world. Several years ago, OpenText knew it had to increase its ability to scale its application environment, which was difficult and time-consuming in the company’s on-premises data center. “We have to support the influx of client data and also quickly scale up or down based on the client’s workload at any given time,” says Brian Lawrence, director of legal tech CloudOps at OpenText.

To address data scalability needs, OpenText created and launched the OpenText Axcelerate eDiscovery cloud platform on AWS. This eDiscovery application delivers features such as advanced technology-assisted review and predictive search. “By collaborating with AWS, we can simplify and accelerate our customers’ transition to the cloud, and we can extend our offerings to be delivered anywhere,” says Stone Scott, director of AWS strategic cloud programs at OpenText.

Axcelerate runs on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store data.

The solution gives law firms enhanced security by leveraging the built-in security features of AWS, a critical benefit because law firms manage sensitive client data. Axcelerate also takes advantage of Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). “This helps us eliminate the time our cloud engineers were putting into managing our databases,” Lawrence says. In addition, OpenText relies on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) to manage its containerized Launchpad application, a part of Axcelerate that clients use to manage end-user passwords and roles alongside the OpenText support team. Axcelerate incorporates advanced analytics, which clients can use to find information faster by limiting eyes-on review of every document to accelerate the document review process.

Supporting its growing eDiscovery platform is no longer an issue for OpenText. Axcelerate scales rapidly on AWS, giving law firms the ability to more easily manage a large volume of legal documents, which often total multiple terabytes.

“Our customers can process as many legal documents as they need, no matter how large the files are, and we are confident that Axcelerate will always scale to meet that demand because it’s running on AWS,” says Lawrence.

The OpenText IT team can also troubleshoot the Axcelerate platform more effectively by using Amazon CloudWatch to monitor the application environment. “We’re able to quickly see when there’s a problem, which we couldn’t do as easily before,” says Lawrence. “We have an automated environment that checks everything for us. Now, we don’t have to wake someone up in the middle of the night, for example, if an instance has failed.”

By using Axcelerate on AWS, OpenText customers can quickly find important documents during the discovery process. “In the legal review process, there could be anywhere from a few hundred documents to millions of documents that need to be reviewed,” says Lawrence. “By running our solution on AWS, we have the performance and scalability to support those requirements for our clients.”

Axcelerate also integrates advanced analytics and machine learning so customers can get the most meaningful legal documents in their hands early in the discovery process, enabling firms to prepare for trials and negotiate settlements faster. “Our customers can quickly find documents without having to manually go through each document,” says Lawrence.

In the wake of increasing cyberattacks and compressed timelines, law firms must reliably and securely access critical data wherever and whenever they need to. OpenText is helping its customers meet these requirements by taking advantage of AWS built-in security features to reduce risk, ensure maximum security and availability, and keep legal data secure and accessible 24/7.

Specifically, AWS provides regional isolation and multiple Availability Zones and offers an infrastructure trusted by financial regulators such as FINRA. As a result, Axcelerate offers a secure, scalable environment for eDiscovery and investigations, no matter the dataset size, number of users, geographic location, or sensitivity of the data.

On AWS, OpenText can take on new Axcelerate clients faster than before. “Onboarding used to take two or three weeks because of constraints of the physical data center environment,” says Lawrence. “Thanks to increased agility from AWS, we can bring on new clients in two days. AWS eliminates the need to plan, acquire hardware, and spend time provisioning.” AWS is also helping OpenText grow its business. The company recently won a multimillion-dollar contract for a new global client. “We onboarded the company quickly and saved it hundreds of thousands of dollars by eliminating the need for an in-region data center,” says Lawrence. 

OpenText plans to build on its global strategic relationship with AWS to benefit its customers in the future. “The expertise and security capabilities of AWS are helping us find new customers across the globe,” Lawrence says. “Because of our partnership with AWS, we can bring those capabilities into the conversation with prospective customers, and that helps instill confidence as we grow our business.”