Weil, Gotshal & Manges is a leader in the marketplace for sophisticated, international legal services. With more than 1,200 lawyers across the US, Europe and Asia, the firm serves the most successful companies in the world in their high-stakes matters and transactions.  Weil, Gotshal & Manges has built a world-class team of lawyers by pursuing a strategy of steady, purposeful growth. The firm continues to build upon a balanced platform of practices and locations, while international expansion over the past decade has resulted in a significant number of the firm’s lawyers now being in Europe.  At Weil, Gotshal & Manges, it is important for its offices operate as "one firm," allowing any of its lawyers to be available to clients anywhere in the world.

THE CHALLENGE
As a leading provider of sophisticated, international legal services across the United States, Europe and Asia, the law firm of Weil, Gotshal & Manges is experiencing significant corporate growth, particularly in Europe.  With a solid number of the firm’s 1,200 lawyers now based in Europe, the London office needed a voice solution that would offer excellent client service and be an effective tool for its employees.

Like many corporations around the world, the firm was using an existing legacy Octel system that was reaching end-of-life and was no longer suitable for its growing requirements. Weil, Gotshal & Manges needed to move to an open standards platform that provides easy to manage features as well as upgrade options that enables expansion capabilities and additional unified messaging features in the future.  The situation required a system that provides excellent functionality without the need for extensive maintenance, simple administration and seamless integration with their existing infrastructure.  There was also a preference to allow users to utilize the same technology across all offices in order to enhance the firm’s identity and provide consistent and reliable service to all of its clients.

THE SOLUTION
Weil, Gotshal & Manges discussed its requirements and options with Voice Products, a Hampshire, UK-based reseller and well-respected authority that provides voice and communication technology services to the UK market.  Voice Products fully endorsed AVST’s CallXpress solution as the best choice to meet the firm’s requirements.  Following this endorsement and the already successful installation and operation of CallXpress in its New York office, Weil, Gotshal & Manges decided to make the AVST platform its corporate-wide messaging solution.  

Building on the successful implementation and usage of CallXpress at its New York headquarters, the firm has installed the solution at its growing London office to maintain a consistent corporate identity as well as provide the best service to its clients and the best working atmosphere for its employees. “CallXpress not only met all of our requirements, but the London team had the extra confidence of knowing the product was already doing well in New York,” said the firm’s Telecommunications Analyst, Jo Woolcott.

CallXpress is the flagship platform of AVST, a leading developer of unified communications solutions for businesses of all sizes.  It delivers advanced unified messaging and speech-enabled capabilities that are designed to provide a consistent corporate identity across multiple office locations and help mobile workers communicate and collaborate more productively and effectively regardless of their physical location.

One key benefit for Weil, Gotshal & Manges is that CallXpress works well with Blackberry devices, providing employees with an excellent mobile communication tool.  A majority of the firm’s lawyers and employees use Blackberry PDAs extensively.  Now with CallXpress they are immediately informed of and can retrieve both email and voice messages from anywhere, at anytime.  This functionality is very useful to the legal community because it improves productivity and speed of communication when attorneys are out of the office due to court appearances, client meetings and telecommuting.

“CallXpress has definitely been a success for us,” said Woolcott.  “The solution itself is robust and flexible and provides more efficient access to messages for our mobile workforce, who can now respond faster by staying connected to all message types, even when out of the office.  The solution, as well as the service and support from Voice Products, is far superior to that of our previous provider.”

The solution is not only a good technology choice, it is also a sound financial investment for Weil, Gotshal & Manges.  “CallXpress is designed to provide companies with the most advanced messaging capabilities that fit at any stage of their corporate communications migration strategy,” said AVST’s Vice President of Marketing, Denny Michael.  “Whether a company is looking to upgrade its existing infrastructure or install a completely new system, our primary objective is to make it as easy as possible for companies to receive the full benefit of a unified communications platform that supports their existing infrastructure.”

Because CallXpress is PBX independent, integrating with over 250 traditional and IP phone systems, integration is never an issue and administrative support is minimal.  CallXpress provides improved system administration through an easy to use Microsoft^® Windows^® application, available across a LAN or WAN environment.  The solution is known for its advanced system administration benefits which reduce the total cost of ownership for large organizations by streamlining administration.

“From an administrator’s point of view, the CallXpress system is very easy to maintain,” added Woolcott.  “It is very quick and simple to add, move or change users all from one central point.  The reporting tool in particular is invaluable.  It is also very comforting to know that we have the ability to expand the system as our requirements develop.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION

About AVST
Applied Voice & Speech Technologies, Inc. (AVST) is a leading developer of unified communications solutions for businesses of all sizes.  Through its world-class unified communications platform, CallXpress^®, and its innovative speech applications module, Seneca^®, AVST offers the industry’s most powerful suite of switch-independent unified communications solutions.  AVST’s solutions enable direct access to an enterprise’s communications infrastructure including voice mail, email and fax messaging from any voice or data device via a touch-tone, GUI or speech interface.   Established in September 2003, AVST was formed from the combined businesses of Sound Advantage (established in 1997) and the AVT division (established in 1982) of Captaris, Inc.

Headquartered in Orange County, CA, AVST maintains facilities in Seattle, WA and the United Kingdom and has remote sales offices across the United States.  With over 35,000 systems installed worldwide, AVST’s unified communications solutions are sold and supported internationally by an extensive network of resellers and OEM partners.  For additional product and sales information, visit http://www.avst.com/contactus/howtobuy.asp or access the company's website at www.avst.com.

About Voice Products
Voice Products specializes in supplying, implementing and supporting world-leading, key technologies that are driving the new communications revolution.  Its mission is to deliver innovative solutions without equal; provide service that exceeds client expectations; and create environments which foster teamwork and dedication among clients, staff and suppliers.