Baker & McKenzie is by some measures the world’s largest law firm. Currently it has approximately 10,000 lawyers and support staff in 73 offices in 46 countries. The geographic distribution, and cultural and language differences, make any global system project challenging. But replacing a core system can be especially harrowing. Fortunately, our story has a happy ending, as we successfully developed and deployed Microsoft Corp.’s Office 2010, including new templates. We were able to upgrade our software with minimal impact on our personnel, with the end result of creating new, effective systems, with lower maintenance costs, that also achieved long-desired global standards for document production.

Like many law firms, we bypassed Vista and Office 2007. The upgrade path for those technologies was not compelling from either cost or function perspectives. But when we looked at Office 2010 we realized that it offered many function advantages over Office 2003, so we started planning our upgrade shortly after it was released by Microsoft. Planning kicked into high gear when the first of our clients began talking about also upgrading to Office 2010. While we have completed our project, for firms that have not yet upgraded from Windows XP, this process is now becoming pressing as Microsoft will terminate its support for XP in April 2014.

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