Lango Legal
Los Angeles, California
Neural Machine Translation
AWS Workspaces, AWS EC2, AWS ECR, AWS ECS
Rapid Growth Drives Need for Additional Cloud Expertise Resources
Serving large law firms around the world—including many of the top 200 firms in the US—Lango Legal has experienced explosive growth right out of the gate. After a rapid round of acquisitions, the start-up needed to migrate a combination of on-premises and cloud IT infrastructures to its Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment.
“With our internal resources focused on application development and other resources operating at full capacity to manage our AWS environment, we needed help with the migrations,” says Daniel Noji, Vice President of Engineering at Lango. “We wanted to complete the migrations quickly so we could manage all the applications in one place. We also faced deadlines in moving the applications out of their previous environments.”
After launching the migration project, another pressing need emerged. A large client urgently requested a cutting-edge service that no one in the industry offered.
“Given that we process data for law firms, much of the information we handle is sensitive and falls under strict privacy regulations that our systems must comply with,” explains Jeff Schmidt, a Co-Founder and the Chief Revenue Officer for Lango. “An international client asked us to create a closed-loop human translation service for multiple languages that would lock down case information so it could not be copied or downloaded and would never leave the country of its origination.”
At the time, Lango already provided closed-loop neural machine translation services where all the translations are handled by computers. But creating a closed-loop same environment for human translation services would prove more difficult—especially with most translators working from home as subcontractors across the globe and thus requiring cloud access.
To meet the client’s stringent security requirements, the human translation service could not allow any public internet access or email connections. “Adding to his challenge was the pressure to deliver a solution for this client within two weeks,” Schmidt points out. “We needed to move fast.”
Lango Legal
Lango Legal is a technology-enabled language management ecosystem. The company’s services leverage automation, data, and human expertise to provide neural machine translations and human translations as well as interpretation, language-management strategy consulting, and bespoke linguistic solutions.
The Lango model allows clients to leverage the entire breadth of the language service industry—going beyond well-known language service providers—to procure vendors directly through the Lango platform with guidance from veteran industry experts.
Key Challenges
AWS Services
Luckily for Lango, the answer to the closed-loop human translation service challenge was already onboard, thanks to Noji having found a partner to assist with the migrations.
“We asked AWS for a referral, and they recommended that we collaborate with Avahi,” Noji says. “We felt comfortable with Avahi because they broke down the migration process for us, and their timelines were achievable. We trust Avahi and appreciate their communication style of keeping us in the loop and offering suggestions to address any challenges we come across.”
Avahi also took a more holistic approach—considering the entire Lango tech stack and the design of the existing AWS infrastructure as opposed to just moving servers from the acquired environments to AWS. “Avahi mapped out how all of the applications could connect on AWS,” Noji says. “They also showed us how we could optimize the costs of our compute resources.”
For the closed-loop human translation service environment Lango required, Avahi responded immediately. “Avahi did not shy away—even with the twoweek timeframe we asked for,” Schmidt says. “They committed to getting the project done in less time, and they delivered.”
Creating a Secure and Restricted Environment
Avahi verified that the Merge AWS environment was designed and deployed correctly and capable of providing a highly-available service that can scale as customer demand increases. The Avahi team then advised on configuration changes to build a multi-tenant environment infrastructure that meets defined security standards and best practices to protect personal information.
To host the closed-loop human translation service, Avahi configured a highly-secure and restricted AWS WorkSpaces environment in which the subcontractors can work. Avahi programmed WorkSpaces to control how content is delivered to the translators and how long they have access to information. Lango also has visibility to make sure translators only execute authorized actions. WorkSpaces blocks public internet access, but Lango can apply application patches to keep it secure through an encrypted client connection that uses the PC over Internet Protocol.
To ensure the service passes security audits, Avahi removed the Firefox and Explorer web browsers normally installed on WorkSpaces. In addition, the translators have no admin rights so they can’t install apps and have no access to email. Avahi also customized AWS controls to securely store translated documents in Amazon S3 where they can be shared with authorized users through a virtual shared drive that also tracks changes. Once a translator finishes with a project, their access to the content is automatically removed.
As the WorkSpaces project wrapped up within a week, Avahi and Lango continued to keep the migration project moving forward. In addition to moving five applications to AWS environment, Avahi evaluated the environment against the AWS Well-Architected framework and recommended how to adjust the setup and configuration.
Avahi also ensured Lango had all the necessary security documentation and identified best practices to close security control gaps. By spinning up AWS Config and AWS Security Hub, Lango can tag compute resources and constantly monitor the environment. The IT team also receives alerts if any performance or security issues occur.
Founder, Bravo Foxtrot
