Cole, Scott & Kissane
Law Firm with Multiple Locations and Over 1,000 Employees Replaces Legacy On-Premises Phone System with Modern RingCentral Cloud Communications Solution
Since rolling out RingEX, for the first time our firm is enjoying an outage-free phone solution. The entire staff is relieved to not have to worry anymore about being unreachable, being unable to speak with current and prospective clients, or not having the right information to return missed calls.
Jason Thomas
Chief Information Officer, Cole, Scott & Kissane
When they began their firm more than 20 years ago, the founding partners of Cole, Scott & Kissane made a commitment to always serve clients with a combination of hard work, integrity, and the most advanced technology available. This strategy proved so successful that today Cole, Scott & Kissane is one of Florida’s most sought-after law firms with 12 locations throughout the state.
Although the firm continuously finds and applies the latest tools and technologies for most of its business operations, such as research, over time Cole, Scott & Kissane found its on-site phone system becoming increasingly out of date and problematic. As the fast-growing firm reached more than 1,100 full-time employees across the state, this problem began to interfere with the firm’s promise to consistently deliver world-class service.
As its on-premises phone system reached capacity, CSK looked for a modern, cloud-based solution
“We had the same on-prem phone system since the firm’s inception,” says Jason Thomas, Cole, Scott & Kissane’s Chief Information Officer.
So as that system neared end of life, Thomas and the other senior managers of Cole, Scott & Kissane decided to migrate to a cloud-based communications solution, rather than another on-premises system, for two reasons.
“We didn’t want to make a huge upfront capital investment in phone hardware,” he explains. “Also, we knew with a cloud-based solution we would get a lot more features. The solution would update itself so we wouldn’t have to. And we would have fewer maintenance and management headaches.”
Unfortunately, after three years with the provider they chose, their system still didn’t live up to the team’s needs or expectations, and while employees still experienced phone downtime, the IT team was dealing with problems of their own. “We had lots of outages, lots of dropped calls, and lots of frustrated lawyers who had trouble being accessible to their clients. At least once or twice a year, we had company-wide phone outages that lasted a minimum of four hours.”
“Also, the admin portal was itself prone to downtime, and it had a really clunky UI,” Thomas explains. “When we wanted to make changes to the system, for example, we often had to find creative and time-consuming workarounds to make those changes stick. Not the best use of our IT team’s time or resources. That type of stuff should just work, right?”
“After at least a year of researching alternatives for this newer solution,” recalls Thomas, “we chose to go with RingCentral on our second go around.”
INDUSTRY
Legal
HQ
Miami, FL
YEAR FOUNDED
1997
EMPLOYEES
1,100+
RingCentral helps the firm deliver world-class service—without a large capital investment
Since switching to RingCentral, Thomas and team have found a system that works well for both their employees and IT.
“Since rolling out RingEX, for the first time our firm is enjoying an outage-free phone solution. The entire staff is relieved to not have to worry anymore about being unreachable, being unable to speak with current and prospective clients, or not having the right information to return missed calls.”
“As for features, our lawyers are thrilled with the call logs and call transcription features, both of which save them time searching for specific details of pending cases and also with compiling billable hours for invoicing. They never had access to these services before RingCentral, and now they can’t live without them.”
Additionally, with the RingCentral mobile app and softphone capability, the firm’s lawyers can now work from anywhere, taking or making calls on their business lines even from their own mobile phones. “Lawyers don’t have to be ‘unreachable’ anymore when they’re in court or on the road, and they no longer have to give out their personal mobile numbers,” Thomas explains. “Also, as we continue to attract a younger generation of attorneys, mobile communication apps like RingCentral will prove a worthwhile and efficient investment for this new way of work.”
The IT team is also happy to know that setting up communications for new locations will be quick and painless because it will no longer require running wire and setting up on-premises phone hardware. “That created delays and other problems,” recalls Thomas. “But with RingCentral, we can get a new location up and running from a communications standpoint pretty much right away and without any frustration.”
Going forward, the firm plans to expand its use of RingCentral platforms. “We plan to use RingCentral Meetings for our firm’s webinars, which we host for state-accredited continuing education units for industries like insurance. Because RingCentral can easily support the large audiences these webinars generate, sometimes up to 1,000 attendees, we’re looking forward to these webinars being much easier to host.”
Lawyers don’t have to be ‘unreachable’ anymore when they’re in court or on the road, and they no longer have to give out their personal mobile numbers.
Jason Thomas
Chief Information Officer, Cole, Scott & Kissane