LEGAL SUCCESS STORY

173-year-old Law Firm Chooses ShoreTel and has Unified Communications Deployed Eight Weeks Later

CHALLENGE:• Bell Gully’s existing telephone

system was at least 15 years old, and its replacement had been an item on the law firm’s capex budget for a number of years. However, over that time other IT projects had been given priority, until a point in mid-2012 when the phone system was recognised by Bell Gully as a significant business risk to the company and required urgent replacement.

SOLUTION:• Requiring a resilient voice network,

Bell Gully deployed ShoreTel voice appliances in both its Auckland and Wellington offices. A ShoreTel 220E1 Voice Appliance and four ShoreTel 90 Voice Appliances have been implemented, with a fifth ShoreTel 90 Voice Appliance providing N+1 redundancy. Desk phones were standardised across the organisation with ShoreTel IP230 handsets deployed to all staff. ShoreTel Communicator was rolled out to provide enhancements to user and group productivity.

BENEFITS:• ShoreTel solution removed a real,

tangible risk to the business

• Rapid deployment – just eight weeks from selecting ShoreTel to rollout of the solution

• Dramatic decrease in time spent on phone system administration

Founded in New Zealand in 1840, Bell Gully is a full service law firm with 43 partners and over 350 staff operating from two offices in Auckland and Wellington. Bell Gully is one of New Zealand’s oldest law firms and also one of its best. Legal guides and directories consistently recognise Bell Gully as being one of New Zealand’s leading firms.

As a full service firm, Bell Gully delivers service to its clients through five key legal departments – corporate and commercial, banking and finance, litigation, property and tax.

Communications is fundamental to the firm’s success. Bell Gully’s service is founded on being available, responsive, commercial, solutions-focused and cost-effective – and on being enjoyable to work with. Its people talk through issues, listen carefully and keep listening.

Bell Gully’s Operations Director Jason Wild joined Bell Gully in November 2011 to oversee the firm’s IT and operations functions, and was given a mandate to improve the quality of supply and service

delivery within Bell Gully’s operational teams. From an IT perspective, Wild has overseen organisational and cultural change in how the department delivers services – and to better leverage Bell Gully’s existing infrastructure to provide better value to the business. The ultimate goal is to move IT from just delivering operational or transactional services to become a value-adding internal business partner.

One of Wild’s immediate concerns was Bell Gully’s telephony system.

“We had a very old system, heading up for 15 years old. There had been an item on the capex budget for about six years to replace it, but it had never got up to the top of the list,” said Wild.

Previous justifications for a new phone system had been based around delivering enhanced features to the firm and had not been compelling enough to gain traction with the partners. According to Wild, articulating the risk associated with a core business system that was end of life, no longer manufactured and essentially unsupportable was key to raising the priority of the project.

Demonstrating ShoreTel’s brilliant simplicity and the project management skills of partner Telesmart, Bell Gully had a fully implemented solution just eight weeks after deciding on ShoreTel.

ShoreTel and Bell Gully PAGE 2

In response, Bell Gully fast-tracked the phone replacement project, and it became a priority for the business. Unfortunately, that risk to the business then became reality in mid-2012 when it became untenable to continue to support the existing PBX. Bell Gully went out to market seeking a new solution.

“We did a due diligence exercise and got down to three different vendor technologies. In terms of functionality and value to the business there was not a lot between them. The way I summed it up was we can’t really make a wrong decision here, we can just make the right decision for different reasons,” said Wild.

A Smart ChoiceBell Gully approached the project in two stages. The IT department spoke to the vendors about their particular technologies, and evaluated the technical features and benefits of each solution, then put a group of partners and secretaries in front of the different technologies to evaluate them.

ShoreTel partner Telesmart was one of the companies asked to present a solution to Bell Gully’s business user group.

“Telesmart did an excellent job in talking to us about our business, not just trying to sell features to us,” said Wild.

“The key thing that came through was Telesmart had taken the time to understand our business and the way we worked, and their presentation was very much based around realistic business scenarios. Given these were a group of non-technical people, they found it very engaging.”

After evaluating the vendor technologies and the capabilities of the service providers to implement the solution, Bell Gully selected Telesmart and ShoreTel.

“One of the key drivers for the ShoreTel system was the simplicity of the architecture – so it wasn’t a complex thing to put in place – and also how readily available and how quick to implement it was. And that was borne out by the actual delivery. We were almost tripping over

ourselves with the speed at which it got implemented. It was pretty impressive, I’d have to say,” said Wild.

“From phoning Telesmart to tell them they had won the business, through to the design of the system, procurement, configuration and installation, it was less than eight weeks. That was actually quicker than at least one of the other vendors could get the kit into New Zealand. That speed of response was quite astounding.”

Telesmart provided two project teams to Bell Gully, to support the law firm’s offices in Auckland and Wellington, and also ran user training, including mandatory sessions for secretaries, in the two weeks leading up to deployment.

“The quality of Telesmart’s project management, and the pre- and post-sales support was excellent,” said Wild.

A Rapid Deployment With its existing telephone system running on a separate network, in the two weeks leading up to the cutover Bell Gully deployed the new handsets to every desk, connected them and checked they were operational.

As a result, Bell Gully and Telesmart were able to complete a full cutover over a weekend.

“It was literally a case of pulling the trunk lines out of the old system and plugging them into the new one, doing a final configuration and then we had a team of us running around on Friday night taking all the old phones of the desks,” said Wild.

“The fact that we could configure the new system in parallel to the old one made it very painless. On the cutover weekend, we had a few issues in Wellington to do with the settings of people who had logged in and out of the phones, but apart from that it was pretty seamless.”

In preparation for the deployment of IP telephony, Bell Gully had already re-configured its WAN for quality of service (QoS), and completed the testing of the new system on its internal network.

“From phoning Telesmart

to tell them they had won

the business, through to

the design of the system,

procurement, configuration

and installation, it was less

than eight weeks. That

speed of response was

quite astounding.”

Jason Wild Operations DirectorBell Gully

ShoreTel and Bell Gully PAGE 3

Telesmart and Bell Gully’s external network maintenance provider worked closely to re-design the network to carry voice in the lead up to the cutover.

“When we implemented the network configuration changes, there was virtually no downtime on the network, because all the configurations had already been tested in the lab,” said Wild.

The new ShoreTel UC system was positively welcomed by staff.

“User uptake of the ShoreTel Communicator desktop application has been high due to its intuitive design,” said Wild.

A New, Risk-free UC SystemRequiring a resilient voice network, Bell Gully deployed ShoreTel voice appliances in both its Auckland and Wellington offices. A ShoreTel 220E1 Voice Appliance and four ShoreTel 90 Voice Appliances have been implemented, with a fifth ShoreTel 90 Voice Appliance providing N+1 redundancy.

Sixty PRI trunks were installed in Auckland plus 30 PRI trunks in Wellington, incorporating Bell Gully’s existing WAN to deliver savings through least cost routing. Desk phones were standardised across the organisation with ShoreTel IP230 handsets deployed to all staff.

Conference rooms were fitted with Polycom SoundStation IP 7000 conference phones, providing a high quality voice conferencing experience.

Enhancements to user and group productivity were delivered to all users through the ShoreTel Communicator UC client. Additional functionality was enabled for 56 personal assistants with Operator Access licences and 14 internal service agents with Workgroup Agent Access licences. ShoreTel Mobile Access Communicator was purchased for key staff with a plan to roll out in conjunction with the firm’s mobility device management (MDM) program.

User productivity was further enhanced with the supply of wired and wireless headsets, including acoustic enhancement

for the hearing impaired. This was very cost effective without the need for handset lifters and expensive cabling.

For Bell Gully, explained Wild, the main benefit of the ShoreTel UC solution was that it removed “a real, tangible risk” to the business.

“We used to worry about it on a daily basis – every time someone wanted us to make a change on a phone, we’d be in there with our fingers crossed – thinking, ‘we could lose our phone system doing this change’. That risk has just gone away. We’ve got N+1 redundancy across our two sites. If something goes wrong with Auckland, we can run our phone system from Wellington and vice versa.”

Bell Gully has also benefited from the ease of administration of the system. Under its former system, the features delivered to the phone were dependent on the port it was using. Now, the fact that the phone system is IP-based means that the handsets have the intelligence built-in.

“When we are moving people around, you don’t have to change anything. You just pick a phone up and plug it in, and it works. The integration with Active Directory makes it a lot easier to get user credentials into the system and bring data across from other systems,” said Wild.

Wild has seen a dramatic decrease in the amount of time Bell Gully’s in-house IT team spends administering the phone system. In the law firm’s dynamic work environment, it’s often necessary to move staff around, but re-provisioning the phones when this happened created a lot of headaches for IT.

Around the end of each year, Bell Gully has a sudden intake of trainees – ‘summer clerks’ – who come in to work for a short period of time over the university holidays

- then go away and come back as law clerks, once they qualify a year later. Wild’s team typically has to set up 30 new phones and extensions, and make sure that the right features were delivered to them.

“We used to spend several weeks getting the phones ready for our summer clerks, to now being less than a couple of days just to allocate numbers,” said Wild.

“When we are moving people

around, you don’t have to

change anything. You just

pick a phone up and plug it

in, and it works.”

Jason Wild Operations DirectorBell Gully

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About ShoreTel

ShoreTel is a provider of business communication solutions whose brilliantly simple unified communications platforms, applications and mobile UC solutions promise a new rhythm of workforce engagement and collaboration. With costly complexity eliminated by design from its award winning, all-in-one IP phone system, UC and contact center solution, and its industry leading hosted business phone system, workers enjoy a freedom and self-reliance that other providers can’t match. Users have full control to engage and collaborate, no matter the time, place or device, for the lowest cost and demand on IT resources in the industry. ShoreTel is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, and has regional offices and partners worldwide. For more information, visit shoretel.com or shoretelsky.com

Bell Gully is also a frequent user of voice conferencing, a service that had been provided externally. ShoreTel conferencing is still being rolled out across the organisation, and Wild is anticipating a material saving from no longer incurring external conferencing charges.

A Few ChallengesWith such a rapid deployment, there were bound to be some things that Bell Gully and Telesmart didn’t get perfectly right on day one. There was some tweaking required to the call flows, but the main oversight was that the project team had made some assumptions about how people work.

“We are a firm that has 43 owners [the partners] who come to work and sit in the office every day. We made decisions about the generic way of working, and one or two partners turned around and said ‘we don’t work that way’.”

It turned out that a number of partners regularly required ad hoc conferencing, calling people and adding them to the call using the conferencing functionality through the desk phone. Bell Gully had set up this form of conferencing to allow three parties to the call – but the project team had to extend this functionality to six for some users.

A Vision for the Future Now that Bell Gully has a stable, risk-free phone system, it is looking to exploit the potential of ShoreTel UC.

Bell Gully is a heavy user of room-based video conferencing, but the rooms are often booked out, so the company is planning to explore desktop video conferencing.

Bell Gully is also considering integration of ShoreTel UC with the firm’s LexisNexis InterAction customer relationship management (CRM) system to extend telephony functionality into the application or the application’s Microsoft Outlook plug-in.

However, one major strategic direction for Bell Gully in 2013 and 2014 is mobility.

“Mobility is a big push for Bell Gully in 2013. Extending the desktop phone functionality out to the mobile device is something we’d like to look at,” said Wild.

“User uptake of the ShoreTel

Communicator desktop

application has been high

due to its intuitive design.”

Jason Wild Operations DirectorBell Gully