Practical Law Company delivers legal know-how online with the help of NTT Europe Online

Practical Law Company (PLC) provides legal know-how, transactional analysis and market intelligence for business lawyers in the UK. Its software solutions include PLC Diligence, an application designed to improve the due diligence process, and PLC FastDraft, which generates first drafts of all transaction documents from a deal database.

PLC’s know-how and software are provided online via subscription-based services and are heavily reliant on the information held in its databases. Given this, PLC was looking to capitalise on the benefits of Oracle’s 10g real application cluster technology to develop a highly scalable and available database solution.

Oracle on demand expertise

NTT Europe Online has partnered with Oracle Corporation to provide hosting solutions for Oracle's On Demand European customers since 2004. When PLC initially approached Oracle about its project, it became clear that NTT Europe Online had the expertise to deliver the infrastructure and application management services PLC needed.

 “Over 2000 UK law firms and in-house legal departments use our technology solutions to deliver core services to their clients, therefore the reliability and security of our software is paramount,” stated Niels Montanana, Technology Director, PLC. “NTT Europe Online had the expertise and global presence to deliver the scalable infrastructure and disaster recovery services we needed. Furthermore, its partnership with Oracle was of great importance given the advanced technology requirements we had.” 

NTT Europe Online designed and implemented development and production platforms in its London hosting facility, with a pre-production environment in its Frankfurt data centre. This set-up ensures that operating system, database and application changes can be developed, implemented and systematically tested before live deployment.

Ensuring continuity of service

The pre-production environment in Frankfurt is also used as a disaster recovery site to ensure continuity of the Oracle solution in the event of a disaster or incident that may temporarily disrupt site availability. Furthermore, NTT Europe Online's own business continuity plan, based on ISO27001*, is externally audited every six months and demonstrates the significance that is accorded to business continuity and information security management throughout the organisation.

* ISO27001 is an internationally recognised security standard that comprehensively defines the requirements for establishing, implementing and documenting an effective information security management system.