Lewis Silkin – a Unified Communications Case Study

ProcessFlows has been providing Unified Communications for Legal Firm, Lewis Silkin, for over 10 years –

Lewis Silkin is a commercial law firm based in London and Oxford.

The firm prides itself on delivering expert advice to clients in plain English, in a timely manner. Communication is therefore an important element of Lewis Silkin’s daily business processes – both internally and externally.

This requires good communication technology and Jan Durant, Director of IT at Lewis Silkin has been on the case for over 10 years. Jan has successfully led Lewis Silkin through the communications journey, from GroupWise, through Exchange 2007 to a communications infrastructure that now fully meets the needs of their highly mobile workforce of IT users.

Huge volumes of emails and voice messages every month

The firm receives hundreds of thousands of emails each month and thousands of voice messages, which could easily end up on the wrong extension or ‘inbox’. If users can’t access emails and messages when they are out and about, a backlog builds up and this has to be dealt with at the beginning or end of the day. A lot of time was spent on ‘admin’.

The challenge was to improve and unify communications for fee earners across multiple locations to give real time access to voice, fax and email messages through Outlook.

An independent communication technology – which would interface with their Mitel® PBX, compliment the incumbent Citrix remote working solution and not restrict further expansion – was sought.

We also wanted to deploy a Unified Communications solution from a single vendor, which did not need extensive and customised integration” said Jan. “Something that would help minimise admin time for our fee earners so they could focus more on core legal skills.

Unified communications

The journey began with the installation by ProcessFlows of AVST’s CX-E with the Mitel telephony platform. CX-E is totally switch independent – working with both legacy and IP telephone systems – giving Lewis Silkin a foundation that could easily be ‘built on’.

Now fully IP enabled, fee earners are able to be immediately notified and access voice, fax and e-mail messages via Outlook from any location – via their web enabled devices – Android, Blackberry, iPhone, iPad etc.

ProcessFlows has delivered true mixed media messaging and the flexibility to respond to messages in the easiest or most preferred communication mode – reply to a voice mail with an e-mail, reply to e-mail with a voice mail, or reply to a fax via e-mail.

It is simple to forward an email to a colleague, adding a personal voice message if required and if users need to view a copy of any email; it can be routed to any fax machine at the press of a button, including any attachments.

“ProcessFlows have supported Lewis Silkin at every stage to improve and maintain an exceptional communication infrastructure within the practice. Their team fully understand our requirements and have provided a good service from sales through to installation and support”

Admin time has been reduced

Users have been freed-up from the backlog of admin at the beginning and end of each day. They are now able to deal with issues in real time and deliver a better service to clients.

“Unified Communications is a great asset to the practice” said Jan. She went on to say that users fully support the communications strategy within Lewis Silkin and although they might not fully appreciate all the benefits, those that move on often comment later on how they miss it. “It is like electricity, it is always there” concluded Jan.