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
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.
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 valueadding 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.
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.
“From phoning Telesmart
to tell them they had won
“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.
the business, through to
A Smart Choice
the design of the system,
Bell 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.
procurement, configuration
and installation, it was less
than eight weeks. That
speed of response was
quite astounding.”
Jason Wild
Operations Director
Bell Gully
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
ShoreTel and Bell Gully
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 reconfigured its WAN for quality of service
(QoS), and completed the testing of the
new system on its internal network.
PAGE 2
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.
“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 Director
Bell Gully
“User uptake of the ShoreTel Communicator
desktop application has been high due to
its intuitive design,” said Wild.
A New, Risk-free UC System
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.
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
ShoreTel and Bell Gully
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.
PAGE 3
A Vision for the Future
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.
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.
A Few Challenges
“User uptake of the ShoreTel
Communicator desktop
application has been high
due to its intuitive design.”
Jason Wild
Operations Director
Bell Gully
With 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.
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.
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
WORLD HEADQUARTERS
960 Stewart Drive, Sunnyvale, CA 94085 USA. shoretel.com and shoretelsky.com
+1 (800) 425-9385 Toll Free +1 (408) 331-3300 Tel. +1 (408) 331-3333 Fax for ShoreTel
+1 (646) 230-5000 Tel. +1 (646) 230-5001 Fax for ShoreTel Sky EMEA
+800 408 33133 Freephone +44 (1628) 826300 Tel.
ASIA PACIFIC
+61 (0)2 9959 8000 Tel.
Copyright © 2013 ShoreTel. All rights reserved. The ShoreTel logo and ShoreTel are registered trademarks of ShoreTel, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other copyrights and trademarks herein
are the property of their respective owners. Specifications are subject to change without notice.