Volterra Fietta

London-based law firm Volterra Fietta is a leader in public international law and arbitration. Its high-profile clients include sovereign states, international organizations, and global corporations. Volterra Fietta handles complex disputes, leveraging its deep expertise in various areas of international law, including maritime law, border disputes, investment treaties, sovereign immunity, and economic sanctions. As industry thought leaders, the firm's lawyers frequently participate in seminars at major conferences.

SITUATION

Volterra Fietta's clients demand strict data security compliance. But the firm must also make legal files and data available to these clients, notes Volterra Fietta Partner Patricio Grané Labat. The firm needs to share documents with third parties, such as international tribunals, co-counsel, opposing counsel, fact and expert witnesses, and translation companies. During international arbitration, the organizations administering the proceedings must also access these files.

To share this content, like many other similar firms, Volterra Fietta adopted a mixed file transfer protocol (FTP) and email system. However, this ad-hoc solution had limited security and did not scale efficiently. Also, email attachments in transit were vulnerable to interception and difficult to manage. "Partners at Volterra Fietta were convinced they needed to further harness information technology to serve clients efficiently and securely," says Grané.

And they needed to prevent data leakage while managing many documents. They began seeking a highly secure file sharing and collaboration solution that could deliver granular tracking, auditing, and file management capabilities.

SOLUTION

After a review, in July 2014, Volterra Fietta selected Intralinks as its file sharing and online collaboration platform. The firm needed the enterprise-level security Intralinks provides, as well as the ability to share data and content with appropriate end users globally.

Being software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based, Intralinks  doesn't burden Volterra Fietta's internal IT resources. And given the firm's international work, the multilingual product interface and the availability of customer support in 140 languages were extra adoption incentives.

Additionally, the solution offers a streamlined interface that helps users to rapidly adopt it, with minimal training. To grant access to content to external collaborators, it's only necessary to invite them to join the appropriate system Workspace.

BENEFITS

After adopting Intralinks, Volterra Fietta saw immediate benefits through risk reduction and user friendly and efficient file management. "With Intralinks, we can manage the document-sharing process, and clients or counsel don't have to call in their IT staff or paralegals," says Grané. "People are spending more time managing the documents themselves, instead of relying on others to help them. This great platform lets our clients work directly with us."

Without using email, the firm can securely and rapidly share briefs and evidence with clients, co-counsel, fact and expert witnesses, translators, and international tribunals. Intralinks also scales as needed to manage the PDF, Excel and other legal files. "We handle thousands of documents: In the specialized international litigation field we live in, that is a sizeable and sometimes intimidating number," says Grané.

The partners have greater peace of mind about maintaining necessary security levels to protect data. The firm can closely restrict what end users can to do to content, even after it's downloaded. For instance, Intralinks' permission controls can dictate how users print, copy, or share documents.

For compliance and management reasons, Volterra Fietta can monitor files and how they are being used. "I am now more in control of the entire collaboration process," says Grané. "Just being able to see who had access to what, when, and how many times is a huge improvement. I didn't have that control with email or FTP systems." Volterra Fietta has also deployed the solution for Android and iPad users.

With Intralinks' continued support and service, Volterra Fietta will be able to leverage this collaboration platform in the long-term, while meeting evolving government and client security requirements.