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CT For Law Firms By Richard "Zippy" Grigonis
Law firms and technology never used to mix very well. Back in my days as MIS Director of Squadron, Ellenoff, Plesent & Sheinfeld in New York, one of the secretaries left the firm for a higher paying job at a competing firm. Within a week, she was back with us.
"What happened?" I asked.
"They didn't have any photocopiers or computers," was the reply. This was 1993.
"No photocopiers?!"
"No, but they did have tri-pack carbon paper."
"Law firms, generally speaking, are a bastion of technological fear," notes Martha Buyer, CT Magazine's new legal columnist and a solo practitioner near Buffalo, NY. "When you look at very dignified, long-time practicing attorneys, they may not want even to be seen using a keyboard, letting alone taking advantage of things that we take for granted, such as e-mail. I think attorneys tend to be much more technologically resistant than their medical or their accounting counterparts."
"Law firms tend to be conservative about implementing new technology," agrees Robin Piazza, senior account manager for major CT systems integrator and service provider Williams Communications (Houston, TX - 800-Williams, www.wilcomsol.com).
Obviously, we're not wasting precious editorial space to tell you where the CT prospecting is poor. We've found some of the people who've sold solutions very nicely and profitably into this vertical market, and gleaned some of the wisdom of the VARs, system integrators, and service providers who've successfully argued their cases to law firms.
Sales to law firms are like all B2B tech sales, only more so: The trick is to find the "killer app" that excites attorneys with its usefulness, or at least convinces them that they can save money.The most obvious CT applications that should be found in every law firm (but aren't) are as follows:
Call accounting and billing subsystems should be better integrated into the computer telephony process. Right now, many phone systems at law firms require attorneys to touch-tone in a client billing number before making a call on his or her behalf. In practice, it often doesn't work very well: Large law firms have thousands of clients, and attorneys don't remember or bother to look up their clients' account codes. Instead, they simply punch in a simple, general office 999-type billing number. This sounds like an excellent job for speech recognition.
In the meantime, there is at least one call-accounting software company, ISI-Infortel (Schaumburg, IL - 847-995-0002, www.isi-info.com) that has a specialty with professional services such as law and accounting firms. ISI's software and services allow these firms to edit captured call records on spreadsheet GUIs and thus easily assign proper client codes. Edited calls can then be fed directly into time-and-billing software to recover costs.
ISI Infortel offers their cost-recovery system as either a professional services package or a client-server, in-house solution. The first, says Charles Ruykhaver, executive VP, is popular with single-site firms. Here, a buffer box captures the PBX's CDR data and uploads it daily or weekly to ISI's own system in Schaumburg. ISI stores lists of valid client codes for all their law-firm clients, which they derive from time and billing files. They then compare the call records against these tables and assign the proper codes. The edited call reports are e-mailed back to attorneys or their administrative assistants, sorted by extension or extension group. Recipients use ISI's Windows software to assign additional codes using drop-down lists, detailed sorting, and other common Windows tools.
The Infortel for Windows CPE product captures CDR data from the company switch and stores it in an on-site SQL server. "Here we go into large, multi-site firms, some with overseas locations," says Ruykhaver. CDR data from buffer boxes at multiple switches goes into the central server. Reports to be edited are distributed across a WAN. Ruykhaver says that ISI performs 90 percent of its own installation and training.
Ruykhaver also notes that law firms are getting increasingly strict about accounting for all outgoing calls, to the point of allocating uncoded or "overhead"-coded calls back to associates' personal accounts. Partly, he says, that's because the days of law firms making a profit on phone charges are over. Although a system like ISI's allows you to set up unlimited billing classes, law clients have gotten more resistant to the idea of markups on expenses. This increases the pressure on firms to see that no calls slip between the cracks. UNIFIED MESSAGING
Unified Messaging is the best entre for CT integration into law firms, according to Williams' Communications' Robin Piazza. She has worked with several law firms in installing CT solutions inside Nortel Meridian shops, including a world-renowned international law firm headquartered in Cleveland (We'd mention their name if it didn't mean we'd have to get approval from several dozen attorneys).
Williams' chance came when the firm was opening two new branch offices and decided to put one Nortel's Call Pilot unified messaging (UM) system to work across ten U.S. locations for 3,000 employees. The firm is also implementing Nortel's Symposium Call Center Express product for its internal IT help desk.
The UM system, linked to headquarters' Meridian, will centralize voice, fax, and e-mail messages and network to all other sites over the ATM WAN. Call Pilot will present all messages through the Lotus Notes e-mail system currently being used. With unusual vision, the firm has also contracted to build a unified voice-and-data network across the ATM backbone.
"They are one of our first truly unified voice-and-data customers," says Piazza. Williams installed Nortel Passports into the PBX to consolidate SNA, LAN, video, and voice traffic. A new Centilliuon 1000 high-capacity multiservice ATM switch takes traffic from the Passport, passing it out over the ATM WAN. The carrier also has installed Nortel Passport at the CO to provide true end-to-end ATM connectivity for the firm for all on-net traffic. Nortel's Accelar high-capacity routing switches operate in the firm's wiring closets.
The all-Nortel solution will take two years to implement; desktops are currently being upgraded with sound cards, speakers, and software to support unified messaging. Replacing old LAN equipment with Nortel Networks/Bay gear will take up most of the second year's implementation. The firm "knew they needed to take a look at voice and data," says Piazza. "This was also perfect timing with Nortel's acquisition of Bay Networks. They now could deal with one vendor to provide the whole voice and data solution."
The firm put out an RFI (request for information), which pinpointed which companies to send the formal RFP. Williams' Nortel-based proposals competed against those of Lucent, Siemens, Cisco, and Cabletron. "They were very impressed with how far along we were on actually converging voice and data. The purchase of Bay put Nortel far ahead; and made them the first major voice vendor to have a data vendor integrated into their product offering," says Piazza.
The centralized unified messaging app made great sense to the firm because it gave ten sites a solution for the cost (in dollars and administration time) of one system. "The other nice thing about unified messaging is that since voice files can be saved as .WAV files, they can be sent anywhere via e-mail and easily saved in client folders," says Piazza. Call Pilot can also save messages in a much more compressed, proprietary format for internal forwarding.
The ATM WAN also made a good case for law firms, which generate tons of document traffic. "There's a lot of inter-office collaboration," says Piazza. New York and Los Angeles may work with one client to get the right specialists on the case. The ATM backbone gives them a chance to pay for just the bandwidth they use, eventually supporting even videoconferencing. That's the major reason for Passport at the edge: voice, video, and data.
"Carriers are charging by the bits for transport across the network, or, as in this case, the VPN," says Piazza, who adds that multi-site law firms are typically just beginning to network their sites. Unified messaging is the CT application most start with, and data security is a top concern when they consider system-monitoring service contracts.
"We assure them that we never run any of our monitoring installations on their LAN. We're on our own network," says Piazza. VOICE-AND-DATA NETWORKING
Prince Law Offices, P.C., (Bechtelsville, PA, - 610-323-4432, www.princelaw.com) is another firm that started off by networking voice and data. Principal Warren Prince makes a fascinating case study, since he's both a lawyer and network designer. Self-taught in telephony and programming since 1981, he's even demoed FoxPro apps at CT Expo that he wrote himself for Phonetastic (remember those guys?). He was even programming with TSAPI back in the mid 1990s.
Prince did such a good job building a computer telephony system for his own law office that he and his colleagues now act as a VAR to other law firms. His new company is called UnConundrum (Bechtelsville, PA - 610-845-0047, www.unconundrum.com). It does wide-area networking, custom software development, web-enabled applications (they did part of the Federal Express Web page), and computer telephony integration.
Prince's specialty is building distributed communications systems that connect remote law offices together. His own Prince Law Offices, headquartered in Bechtelsville, PA, has branch offices in Bethlehem, Camp Hill, Lebanon, North Wales, Pottstown, Reading, Scranton, and Stroudsburg.
"At this and another location we're using a Comdial FXS; you know, the one that rolls around on casters," says Prince. "There's also an old Comdial DXP PBX at one of the remote offices. We also have WideOpen.Office Comdial's telephony server for TSAPI-compliant applications running here. About five of the support staff use the local FXS system."
The voice network consists of both frame relay and IP connections. The gateways consist of Motorola 6520s at five locations, and a 6560 at a sixth. Voice over Frame Relay (VoFR) connects four of the sites together within the LATA, while two other sites are connected by jumping across the LATA over the Internet using voice-over-IP (VoIP). (The LATA, or local access and transport area, is a geographical area in which the local telephone company is allowed to carry not only local calls, but long distance toll calls too. Jumping across the LATA with VoIP saves on toll calls). The connections between the routers are dedicated.
"We got all of this equipment to talk to each other," says Prince. "If you had called in and I was in our Pottstown office, but you had known the correct extension number, you could have reached me there through our switch and the frame relay line. Now, if I were in the Lebanon or Camp Hill offices, that extension number would have routed your call over VoIP instead. The whole process remains invisible to the caller."
"No special connecting software had to be written," continues Prince. "You have to program the Comdial switch, of course, since it has a least-cost-routing table. There's an LCR table in the routers, too, for two levels of routing. If I'm in a location that has a switch such as the DXP or the FXS, the switch may send the call to a router, and the LCR table there figures out which router is the next hop."
The voicemail system used in conjunction with the headquartered Comdial system is from Key Voice Technologies (Sarasota, FL - 800-419-3800, www.keyvoice. com, recently acquired by Comdial). No matter which office an attorney calls in from, he or she can access voicemail with a toll-free call, over the private VoIP or VoFR networks. Key Voice's system uses a four-port analog Dialogic board, since it must connect to the IRST ports on the Comdial switch.
Some of the switching scenarios possible with this system are quite sophisticated. Say that "Mary" works in the Lebanon office. If she wants to check for messages on the server in the Bechtelsville office, she picks up her phone, which is physically connected to an FXS port in the Motorola 6520 router. She dials the extension for voicemail (it happens to be 2001) and those digits are passed to the router. The router looks them up in the LCR table, finds the destination to be Bechtelsville, and then signals that an IP connection must be used to get over to the next hop toward Bechtelsville, which is the router in the Reading office.
In Reading, the router also sees that the packets are heading for Bechtelsville. Its LCR table tells it to route the call over this last hop via frame relay, not IP. The call finally reaches the Bechtelsville router, which connects through a standard E&M port to the Bechtelsville Comdial FXS. The Comdial FXS, knowing that extension 2001 is a voicemail port, sends the call to the Key Voice voicemail system out of an IRST port. The voicemail system picks up, Mary presses the # key and her extension. This sends the call to her mailbox, asks her for her password, and then plays her voicemail to her back down the chain.
"We can also use Key Voice's VCM software from remote locations," says Prince. "That's GUI-based PC software, so that graphically you can pick up a list of voicemails and retrieve them as a series of .WAV files downloaded to your computer and listen to them through your audio card and speakers. Sometimes that seems a little slower. But it makes it easier to check voicemail if you have to RAS in from remote locations. I always use VCM here at my desk."
From a voice standpoint, the system can go one step further. "We can also seize lines at our remote locations and get dial tone from there," says Prince. "So if I'm sitting here in Bechtelsville and I need to make a call to Harrisburg, I dial a number. The table in the switch is consulted, it sends the call out through the E&M port to a router's FXS port, then via frame relay to Reading, where it's converted to VoIP, jumps over the LATA, and picked up in Lebanon. From Lebanon it's routed to Camp Hill, where the router there also has an FXS port connected to a POTS line. It'll seize that line and dial a local number in Harrisburg without incurring a long distance charge." Prince prefers PBXs and routers to fully PC-based telephony systems.
"Comdial makes the FXS look like a PC server, but it's really two machines in one," says Prince. "They're not fully integrated with one another. The PC-based Altigens are neat products, but they haven't priced themselves to be really competitive. They've priced themselves the same as many PBXs. Many people prefer to stick with the PBX that you know works and that you've been comfortable with - you don't have to learn new technology."
Prince loves Motorola routers. "I can plug a phone into one and dial a number just as if I'm connected to the PSTN. It will strip numbers, pad numbers - it'll do anything I want to do to that number."
"We use technology to move forward, as opposed to just throwing people all over the place," says Prince. "No one has their own particular secretary, and we do a lot through technology. For example, every piece of postal mail that comes in here gets scanned into TIF files that we store on our servers. Then we e-mail pointers to those TIFs to the attorneys. We have a firewall and a virtual private network (VPN), so attorneys can log in from their offices or homes and read all their mail as e-mail. Between the offices, e-mail travels over frame relay or IP. If attorneys are accessing it from home, they're using a plain old dial-up connection to an ISP."
For faxes, Prince uses a fax server from GFI (Cary, NC - 888-243-4329, www.gfi.com). "We also have a Microsoft Exchange server running, but we haven't tried doing unified messaging with that yet," says Prince. "We haven't had a real need for it."
There's one other application that Prince has written and is thinking of selling to law firms: a dictation system.
"We've written the engine part," says Prince. "The back of it sits on an NT server here in Bechtelsville. We set up a voicemail box to serve as the "dictation box," and every two minutes the system goes and looks for new dictation or new voicemail messages in that box. If it finds something, it converts the message to a RealAudio file, and we stream it over a RAS connection to our transcriptionist's PC in her home."
Prince concludes, "We're a sort of legal VAR. We do custom programming and our niche is remote offices. We enable large offices to communicate both voice and data with remote offices via distributed communications systems. It's a function, really, of what the Motorola gear is capable of doing. We can build the applications to work over such networked systems as well, so that, for example, if someone wants to share a SQL database, we can write the front-end or the back-end. We can do whatever they need." VIDEOCONFERENCING
Depending who you ask, the up-and-coming CT application among lawyers is or is not videoconferencing. Some say that no videoconference can take the place of an in-person deposition, where the attorney can see the witness sweat, smell his fear, see every subtle nuance of a person's testimony. On the other hand, magazine Amlaw Tech surveyed the top 100 law firms last year, and found that 72 percent had videoconferencing capability, compared with 49 percent from the year before.
That's good news for video VAR Stephen LaMarche, VP of sales and marketing for Video Network Communications Inc. (Portsmouth, NH - 603-334-6700, www.vnci.net).
VNCI's star law-firm client is Greenberg Traurig & Hoffman LLP in Miami, an international law firm with more than 600 attorneys practicing in 17 cities, including six locations in Florida. Greenberg Traurig decided on VNCI's video distribution technology to support collaboration across practice lines and between offices. The VNCI system also allows their attorneys to communicate with far-flung clients.
"We dealt directly with Greenberg Traurig's CIO, Jay Nogle," says LaMarche. "His charter is to keep them ahead in terms of technology." And they're very proud of their technological cutting edge: Ranked number one in technology out of 158 firms by the Winter 1999 issue of Amlaw Tech, the firm devotes a good portion of its website to its technological sophistication.
VNCI's video technology first went into the firm's Miami, Florida location and in regional offices in Tyson's Corner, Virginia, and Phoenix, Arizona. There now are upward of 80 video stations at Greenberg Traurig. Some units are desktops; some serve groups in small meeting rooms.
Three BRI ISDN channels connect the law offices' video systems, for a total combined bandwidth of six 64 Kbps bearer channels, or 384 Kbps. "Ninety-nine percent of major video installations still run over ISDN, and follow the H.320 interoperability standard," says LaMarche.
VNCI's own patented broadband videoswitch, the VidPhone Switch 50, acts as video switch to the multi-site system. It's compatible with digital, analog, or ISDN-enabled PBXs, key systems, hybrids, or Centrex phone systems. It's a small microwave-sized box that can be rackmounted or can sit on legs in a phone closet, where it connects to the cross connect or punch-down panels in the wiring closet.
The basic switch consists of a chassis and power supply, along with the Main Controller (controlling all cards in the switch and handling setup and tear-down of video calls) and Video Matrix64 cards for non-blocking switching of video signals within the switch. The non-blocking architecture supports up to 64 simultaneous, independent video calls or simultaneous broadcasts to over 60 stations.
The switch can hold 13 option cards, such as the VidModem5 card to provide service to five stations simultaneously, the Direct Access5 card to connect various video, audio, or data systems, such as external codecs, CATV tuners, and DVDs, as well as other VidPhone switches. All cards and power supplies are hot-swappable.
On the endpoints, conferees use PC-based VidPhone stations. At the LAN-to-WAN juncture, VidPhone Gateways make the connection via ISDN (H.320 standard), or ATM or TCP/IP protocols using T-1 or fiber connections. At the Greenbert-Traurig installation, the gateway uses cards from Zydacron (Manchester, NH - 603-647-1000, www.zydacron.com). "We use their card strictly for the ISDN connection. The rest of the architecture is our own hardware and software," says LaMarche.
"We use off-the-shelf equipment for cameras, speakers, and things like at the endpoints, depending on the level of audio video integration required. We use Canon cameras, for example. But the switch architecture and the endpoint software were developed totally by us," he adds.
Greenberg Traurig isn't yet recording or storing any video conversations, but LeMarche says that's one of the capabilities they'll add. They may bring some VCRs into the network for short-term storage. LaMarche also notes that videoconferencing and broadcast technology has risen in popularity over the years as its price has dropped.
"Law firms are not normally known for being highly receptive to new technology, but since we've done our work for Greenberg and there's been some media exposure about it, other inquiries are coming in," says LaMarche. "I've been in the video industry for ten years now, and I'm seeing more interest from the legal community now than I ever have." MONITORING/LOGGING
Of all the apps described here, monitoring may be the hardest sell: Both attorneys and clients have an aversion to call monitoring and recording, since any conversation between an attorney and his client can be misconstrued, given enough time, money, and scrutiny by other attorneys. Indeed, attorneys abhor the use of e-mail to send any kind of sensitive communication, since copies of e-mails sit on any one of a chain of hard drives and servers, any straggling copy of which has a knack of reappearing under the discovery process (just ask Microsoft).
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