6X More Frequent Deployments for Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer
by the Numbers
1743
London, England
5,000+
Employees
2,800+
Lawyers (Partners & Associates)
£1,701
Billion in Revenue
About the company
Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer is the oldest international law firm in the world. Founded in 1743, the London-based legal practice is a member of the prestigious Magic Circle and serves multinational corporations, governments, and financial institutions across three continents. Freshfields’ core specialties are corporate law, mergers and acquisitions, litigation, and taxes.
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In 2021, Freshfields implemented Salesforce to merge a myriad of data sources into one CRM platform and provide a complete 360-degree snapshot of the client record for lawyers, assistants, and business development teams.
Salesforce enabled Freshfields to think outside the box and add more value to client relationships — but time-consuming deployments and a litany of false failures threatened to disbar the firm’s digital transformation dreams. Enter Copado CI/CD.
Senior Global Manager of CRM & MarTech, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer
Results with Copado
6X
10X Faster
Faster to Deliver Changes (From 3+ Hours to 30 Minutes)
500%
9X Faster
Increase in Salesforce Users (2,750 Users)
Daily
Salesforce Releases
10-Minute
Process to Move from Dev Org to Test Org
The Challenge
Freshfields replaced their legacy CRM with Salesforce to drive digital maturity. As a result, they increased their customer count by over 500% — from 140 to 2,750 users. But their deployment was still a mess and often required developers to spend extra hours and weekends to fix the issues.
Freshfields used to have a 22-page booklet that talked about how to use alternative code management systems to pull down changes, push them to CI/CD tools and validate them. Up until the day they ended that process, developers still had that booklet because they couldn’t understand the pipeline from end to end.
Expediting a Manual, Multi-App Salesforce Development Lifecycle
Back then, Freshfields used five apps to manage scratch orgs. If a developer built something new, they spent up to 3 hours manually navigating the different properties and verifying committed changes. If the commits triggered false failures, it often took developers 3–8 hours to complete the changes.
The system also kept false-failing and wouldn’t let them pass it. They weren’t genuine errors, but Freshfields team had to keep starting over. One change could take up to 8 hours.
KeyChallenges
The Solution
To solve the Salesforce development issues, Freshfields started looking out for the best DevOps tool for the job. After referrals from Salesforce and Freshfields’ Salesforce System Integration Partner, the law firm implemented Copado CI/CD in less than six weeks to improve their development process across Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and CRM Analytics.
Today, Freshfields uses Copado CI/CD to record ideas and bugs and create user stories. Once the decision is made for developers to move forward, the law practice uses Copado to promote changes through the pipeline and manage the end-to-end process.
The Future
While Freshfields’ DevOps journey is still in its infancy, Copado CI/CD has already generated huge improvements in terms of time savings and user adoption. The law firm’s processing time has decreased dramatically to 40 days and their release schedule has evolved from quarterly to monthly.
“We now use Copado for our full DevOps cycle — we don’t really use any other tools now,” says Ashton-Chalmers, sharing his team’s faith on Copado CI/CD.
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