Law Firm Lathrop & Gage Deploys Innovative Technologies From Polycom and Riverbed To Make Global Workforce More Efficient and Productive

Established law firm reduces costs and improves employee work-life balance with Polycom telepresence and Riverbed WAN optimization solutions

KANSAS CITY, Mo., PLEASANTON, Calif. and SAN FRANCISCO - With more than 300 attorneys in 11 offices throughout North America, full-service law firm Lathrop & Gage is continuously seeking ways to better serve its clients and improve collaboration among offices. As part of these efforts, the firm recently installed Polycom (NASDAQ: PLCM) high-definition telepresence systems and Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD) wide area network (WAN) optimization solutions to improve inter-office collaboration, client meetings, and the conducting of remote depositions, resulting in dramatic improvement in the quality of client support and attorney productivity.

Lathrop & Gage is a prime example of the changes taking place in the workforce today. More and more companies are turning to visual communications (VC), including video conferencing and on-demand training videos. This shift to VC has resulted in increased bandwidth utilization. In lieu of expensive bandwidth upgrades, companies are turning to WAN optimization to reduce bandwidth utilization and accelerate traffic traveling between geographically dispersed offices. Firms such as Lathrop & Gage that are embracing new technologies are discovering opportunities to make targeted investments that produce a significant ROI and improve employee productivity.

“We’re interested in serving our clients in the best manner possible, and telepresence is a phenomenal tool for extending our capabilities to do so,” said Ben Weinberger, CIO at Lathrop & Gage. “Lathrop & Gage grew over the years through mergers and acquisitions, which has positioned us well to address the needs of our clients on a very local level, but at the same time, it has created communications challenges. We identified enhanced telepresence as one of the best ways to connect our geographically dispersed lawyers face-to-face and in real time. Also, adding WAN optimization has made collaboration more efficient and cost-effective.”

Lathrop & Gage installed standards-based Polycom® HDX™ 9000 Series and Polycom HDX 7000 Series telepresence systems at each of its offices. Weinberger views Polycom telepresence solutions as key to improving collaboration. In fact, Lathrop & Gage hosts more than 300 meetings each month in its Kansas City conference center. More than a quarter of those involve high-definition video conferencing, and widespread user adoption has resulted in over 900 hours of video conferencing annually.

An added benefit of the telepresence solution is reduced travel and associated costs. Weinberger estimates the annual savings in reduced travel expenses more than pays for the cost of the Polycom solution. For example, by using telepresence to conduct a meeting with a New York client, a Kansas City attorney saves an average of $1,500 in travel expenses. Weinberger said that telepresence ultimately represents a savings of more than $30,000 annually for a single attorney.

Hosting 900 hours of video conferencing each year requires planning with regard to the IP network. Weinberger and his team turned to Riverbed® to deploy its Steelhead® appliances for WAN optimization. By dramatically reducing the amount of application traffic on the WAN with Steelhead appliances, the firm is provided more available bandwidth for video conferencing. The Steelhead appliance deployment has provided efficient bandwidth for video conferencing and has allowed the company to accelerate mission-critical applications while avoiding expensive bandwidth upgrades.

Weinberger noted that the Riverbed solution has also contributed significantly to both cost savings and efficiency savings for the firm. Not only has the firm saved money by reducing bandwidth requirements, but it has been able to reduce the number of servers required to run the network as well as save on software license and maintenance costs. According to Weinberger, the ROI on its Riverbed Steelhead deployment was 12 months.

“With our investments, Lathrop & Gage is able to further consolidate IT infrastructure, reduce costs, enhance productivity, and improve data protection and management,” said Weinberger.

Riverbed WAN optimization solutions enable organizations of all sizes to overcome a wide range of IT infrastructure performance bottlenecks, including poor application performance, slow database backups and insufficient bandwidth at remote sites. By speeding the performance of applications between data centers, remote offices and mobile workers, in some cases by up to 100 times, the Riverbed award-winning Steelhead products allow companies to consolidate IT, improve backup and replication processes to ensure data integrity, and improve staff productivity and collaboration.

“A significant and growing aspect to our business is global, and telepresence provides a great way to serve our clients and their interests in other countries in a timely and cost-effective manner,” said Weinberger. “Polycom and Riverbed continue to innovate in areas that directly help us to improve both our business productivity and our bottom line.”

Learn more about Lathrop & Gage’s visual communication solution on Polycom’s Web site:
Polycom Video with Riverbed QoS Boosts Productivity for Geographically Dispersed Law Firm Lathrop & Gage

About Polycom
Polycom, Inc. (NASDAQ: PLCM) is the global leader in telepresence, video, and voice solutions and a visionary in communications that empower people to connect and collaborate everywhere. Visit www.polycom.com for more information and follow us on Twitter @AllAboutPolycom.

About Riverbed
Riverbed Technology is the IT infrastructure performance company. The Riverbed family of wide area network (WAN) optimization solutions liberates businesses from common IT constraints by increasing application performance, enabling consolidation, and providing enterprise-wide network and application visibility – all while eliminating the need to increase bandwidth, storage or servers. Thousands of companies with distributed operations use Riverbed to make their IT infrastructure faster, less expensive and more responsive. Additional information about Riverbed (NASDAQ: RVBD) is available at www.riverbed.com

Forward Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements relating to the expected demand for Riverbed’s products and services, statements regarding customer payback following implementation of Riverbed solutions that may suggest likely or certain outcomes, and statements relating to Riverbed’s ability to meet the needs of distributed organizations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions, that, if they do not fully materialize or prove incorrect, could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements include our ability to react to trends and challenges in our business and the markets in which we operate; our ability to anticipate market needs or develop new or enhanced products to meet those needs; the adoption rate of our products; our ability to establish and maintain successful relationships with our distribution partners; our ability to compete in our industry; fluctuations in demand, sales cycles and prices for our products and services; shortages or price fluctuations in our supply chain; our ability to protect our intellectual property rights; general political, economic and market conditions and events; and other risks and uncertainties described more fully in our documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission. More information about these and other risks that may impact Riverbed’s business are set forth in our Form 10-Q filed with the SEC on July 30, 2009. All forward-looking statements in this press release are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we assume no obligation to update these forward-looking statements. Any future product, feature or related specification that may be referenced in this release are for information purposes only and are not commitments to deliver any technology or enhancement. Riverbed reserves the right to modify future product plans at any time.