War Room in a Hotel and Getting Internet Access

This very topic might be one of the most important issues you have to work out. Many people will look at the final tally of posts on this series of blog posts, search for this particular topic, and decide this is the only one they need to read. I’ve already made a short list of maybe 20 to 30 different topics I can post about, but maybe this really IS the only one you need. Read on.

You’ve been tasked with building a war room and people are going to show up. For this post I’m specifically talking about working out of a hotel. These are your marching orders…..you have to build a war room and it’s going to be in a hotel and you have to be up and running by such-and-such date. You have to figure out, starting right now, about how you are going to provide internet access for your team.

Getting internet access at the hotel is perhaps one of the trickiest things to do. It doesn’t have to be, but it can. Most of the time, your people talk with their people and somewhere during the process decide this is where you’re going to be working and staying. That decision might be based on how nice the hotel is, how convenient it will be for getting to the courtroom, the parameters of the contract, the fact that the person representing the hotel says they have internet access, any combination of these things or some other reasons. No matter what went in to the final choice, now it’s your mission to figure out how to get enough bandwidth to support your group.

There are a few scenarios that can play out. Let me rattle off a few I've personally had to deal with, although this isn't a comprehensive list.

• You’ll be working out of a hotel that really hasn't done this before. It can be a place that’s decades old or brand spanking new. You have to work with them to determine what they can or can’t provide and invent the wheel.
• You’ll be working in a place that has had bigger groups before or smaller firms and they think they’ve done it before. They don’t really have bandwidth for you. You’ll be inventing the wheel here too.
• You find out that where you’re staying doesn’t have much bandwidth, they won’t let you bring in outside access (or there aren’t any other outside options to be had). This one will probably be painful. This might be a relatively small community and there just aren’t any other alternatives so you have to work with what you’ve got.
• You’ve hit the jackpot! You talk to the hotel and they say something like, “oh, we do this all the time, let me put you in touch with the IT group.” You find out that they can slice off some significant bandwidth and VLAN it for you and putting your VPN router won’t be a problem.
• Another jackpot. You’re going back to a place you’ve been before, don’t have to reinvent the wheel and everything is going to be smooth.
• Mix it up. You talk with the hotel and they don’t have bandwidth, they don’t want to work with you on bringing outside access in (or having any access to their cable plant, switch room, etc.), and frankly they don’t want you asking any more pesky questions. There are businesses that will actually appreciate your team staying and working there and will bend over backwards to make a win/win situation. You need to convince the person that decided on that hotel that they need to look elsewhere.

There will be subgroups of challenges within most of those I've listed above. This is no cookie-cutter type of problem where you know every time it’s going to be option A or option B.  Solving the bandwidth problem takes analysis and sometimes creative solutions which I can discuss further as I go into these different problems. As I believe I mentioned in an earlier post, it is SO VERY IMPORTANT to work with the people at the hotel in a way that shows you to be professional, someone who can keep his or her word, have empathy with what challenges they might have in addition to helping them to understand yours and play nice in their sandbox. Nobody will help you if you are demanding or condescending, that’s for sure.

Can you take some time to describe how you can help them get something in place they can use as a selling point for future law firms? If they agree that you can bring in something like cable internet to their switch room, won’t you help move things forward by saying that your firm will pay the installation fee? You need to honestly convey to them that you care about not having any negative effect in any way on their infrastructure and that when you have finished your trial that everything will look and work just as it did before you got there. With some open and frank communication, some hotels will absolutely agree to these things. They recognize business value in your proposal and in the probability of similar repeat business whether it is from your firm or others. Law firms learn which hotels can provide what they need and those businesses in turn stay booked up. I know, sometimes I have to compete to be in some of those hotels before opposing counsel gets the contract!

Now that I’m looking back at this post, I can write complete individual responses to each of the scenarios I've listed above. In order to avoid this one becoming a giant wall of text, I’ll put this up and then start writing out the information for each of them to follow. Since I have begun writing about litigation war rooms, I've been adding to my list of topics to elaborate on and that list keeps getting longer. I’ll keep at it, so check back once in a while and see how it’s progressing.

~L