Lexitas Automated Its Daily US–India Handoff on Files.com and Shut Down Microsoft IIS FTP

Lexitas provides technology-enabled litigation support: court reporting and depositions, record retrieval, process service, and legal staffing for law firms, corporations, insurers, and courts across the United States. The business runs on work product. Transcripts and records move constantly between the people who produce them and the people who need them, and more than 1,300 employees keep that pipeline moving. Part of the production pipeline sits offshore: a team in India processes each day's work, and the US team picks it up, modifies it, and sends it back. Every business day, files have to cross between the two.

The Server That Survived the First Migration

For years, that handoff ran on a self-hosted Microsoft IIS FTP site. The India team uploaded the day's files into dated inbox folders. The US team downloaded them, made its changes, and returned the results through an outbox. The structure that kept the exchange orderly, a folder tree organized by year, month, and day, was created by hand. Somebody built it, day after day, because the day's work had nowhere to land until they did. The hard part of replacing the server was never the users. It was the structure they worked inside.

That put two standing costs on a single daily workflow. IT had to keep an aging Windows FTP server alive, because two production teams on two continents depended on it every morning. And it had to spend recurring administrative time on folder scaffolding: work that produced nothing, existed only so the exchange could keep its shape, and never went away.

The server had already outlived one migration. Lexitas had retired its self-hosted SFTP infrastructure onto Files.com, but the IIS site kept running, because the workflow on it was live daily production across time zones, and a platform that merely hosted the files would have moved the manual folder work rather than removed it.

A Replacement That Had to Run Itself

Jesse Oldfield, the Senior System Administrator who owned the server, set the bar for its replacement plainly:

“I'm trying to get rid of that IIS FTP setup. In order to do that, I would like to have it automated so I don't have to touch it or worry about it other than assigning permissions to users.”

That was a specification. The replacement had to generate the dated inbox and outbox structure on its own, every day, with nobody building it. It had to govern each team's access through permissions. And it had to leave the administrator exactly one recurring task: deciding who gets in.

Lexitas selected Files.com to carry the handoff.

A Deliberately Small Cutover Built on Scheduled Automations

The cutover was scoped tight: just the two teams that actually touch the handoff, about fifteen users in total across India and the US, and Lexitas provisioned them itself. The Files.com side of the project came down to two pieces of configuration.

The first was a scheduled Files.com Automation configured to create the year/month/day folder tree every day. The structure the teams work inside now exists without anyone creating it, generated by the platform rather than by a person. The second was folder permissions, which decide what each user can reach, assigned once when the user is set up.

Oldfield had braced for the automation work to be the painful part of the project. It wasn't.

“Those were really easy. I thought this was going to be convoluted and terrible, but it was actually quite painless.”

The Folder Tree Now Builds Itself

With the handoff running on Files.com, Lexitas replaced a server it had to keep alive, and a folder structure it had to build by hand, with an exchange that maintains itself.

• The Microsoft IIS FTP server was shut down. There is no transfer server behind the handoff for IT to host or keep alive.
• The dated folder scaffolding is fully hands-off. Files.com generates the year/month/day tree every day on schedule, and manual folder creation is gone from the workflow.
• The administrator's recurring work dropped to the one task Oldfield asked for: assigning permissions when someone needs access.
• The teams' daily rhythm didn't change. India uploads, the US downloads, modifies, and returns, exactly as before. The structure underneath is simply no longer anyone's job.