A litigation firm with two offices and 22 attorneys was losing billable hours to a failing VPN. Three months after moving to VulcanCloud DaaS, they passed their cyber insurance audit and eliminated remote-work IT complaints entirely.
Hartwell & Pruitt (name changed) is a two-office litigation firm in the Southeast with 22 attorneys, 8 paralegals, and a 3-person administrative staff. Like most law firms their size, they relied on a combination of on-premises servers, a legacy VPN, and a patchwork of SaaS tools that had accumulated over a decade of growth.
The VPN worked well enough when remote work was occasional. Once attorneys started working from home regularly, it became the firm's biggest IT problem. Slow connections during peak hours. Dropped sessions during depositions. Attorneys calling the admin team mid-client-meeting because they couldn't access files. The managing partner described it as "burning billable hours on IT issues every single week." Their on-premises server had gone down twice in the previous quarter — once mid-deposition when an attorney couldn't pull a brief — and the local IT vendor's response time was measured in hours, not minutes.
Their cyber insurance carrier was also asking harder questions at renewal. The firm's IT provider — a local MSP — couldn't provide the documentation the carrier needed around data isolation, access controls, or audit logging. Premium was set to increase 35% unless the firm could demonstrate improved security posture. The risk was real: law firms have become a preferred ransomware target — firms like Moses Afonso Ryan lost over $700,000 in a single attack, and breach incidents at major firms have exposed millions of client documents. A small litigation firm with aging infrastructure and no documented security controls is exactly the profile attackers look for.
VulcanCloud provisioned a Citrix-powered managed DaaS environment in a US-based private cloud. Every attorney and staff member received a fully managed virtual desktop — identical experience from any device, at any location, with no local data.
Clio and the firm's document management system were hosted inside the virtual desktop environment. Attorneys access them the same way they always have — but now from a managed, monitored, encrypted session instead of a VPN tunnel to aging on-prem hardware.
Migration was scheduled across three evenings to avoid disrupting active matters. By day four, every user was operating on the new platform. VPN was decommissioned the following week.
For cyber insurance purposes, VulcanCloud provided documented evidence of MFA enforcement on all sessions, role-based access controls, full audit logging of file access and session activity, and data isolation architecture — everything the carrier had asked for.
"We went from attorneys calling the admin at 9pm because they couldn't access a deposition brief, to nobody calling about IT at all. The technology just works. That's what we needed." — Managing Partner, Hartwell & Pruitt
Within 90 days of go-live, the firm had zero IT-related complaints from attorneys about remote access. Their cyber insurance renewal came in flat — no increase — because they could now document the security controls their carrier required. Two attorneys who had been semi-retired due to commute issues came back to full capacity once remote access was reliable. The firm estimates recovering 4–6 billable hours per attorney per month that were previously lost to IT friction — at average billing rates of $350/hour, that's meaningful annual revenue recovery across a 22-person team. One partner noted they'd begun evaluating a 20% reduction in office footprint now that remote work was genuinely seamless — a cost reduction that would dwarf the DaaS monthly spend.
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