Compuware Vantage Solves VoIP Problem for Leading Law Firm

The telephone is an essential tool for lawyers. The 200-plus lawyers of Dickinson Wright PLLC took their phones for granted before the large law firm rolled out its new VoIP phone system two years ago. The new phones had high technology but low reliability. Compuware Vantage allowed the lawyers to get back to talking with their clients instead of the help desk.

A law firm's economic success is driven by its sole providers-the lawyers. As such, any issue that impacts the productivity of the legal staff has a direct impact on the firm's bottom line. Especially when the issue involves a lawyer's most essential communication tool: the telephone.

Dickinson Wright PLLC encountered a major issue during a phone system upgrade two years ago that left the IT department of the Detroit-based law firm scrambling. The analog phone system that Dickinson Wright had used at its six offices was old, but it was reliable. Unfortunately, the system was out of production. Replacement parts were becoming difficult to find, creating the need for a new solution.

The solution that CIO Michael Kolb and his 14-person IT staff settled upon was a new Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) system. VoIP was gaining momentum as a business solution that provided voice communications, voice mail and infrastructure flexibility at a better price than traditional analog phone systems.

Dickinson Wright rolled out the VoIP system and the phones started ringing. Unfortunately, the phones that were ringing most often belonged to Kolb and his help desk staff. There were frequent outages when long distance and voice mail services were unavailable, cutting the vital communication lines between the firm's lawyers and their clients.

"The first two months after we rolled the phones out was a very difficult, trying time," Kolb says. "We had nothing but trouble. I was getting 25-30 calls a day. It was miserable on a daily basis, taking a constant beating. Lawyers work all hours of the night. I was getting calls from all six of our offices at 10, 11 o'clock at night. 'I'm in the office, I can't make a long-distance call.'"

Kolb and his staff discovered that critical VoIP services were stopping without explanation on the Dickinson Wright servers, causing long-distance and voice-mail outages until the services were restarted. It was a time-consuming manual process for the IT organization, which was being overwhelmed by the problem.

In looking for a solution, Kolb was impressed with the Compuware Vantage application service management suite. He asked for a demonstration, and quickly decided Vantage could help cure Dickinson Wright's phone ills. The company implemented the product, configuring it to reset the phone services automatically after a service interruption was detected.

"Instead of me getting an e-mail or call from a lawyer telling me the phones were down, the Vantage product gave me notification that there was a problem," Kolb says. "It's not a hunt-and-fix anymore. Now we're notified when Vantage has made a proactive response to what needed to be done. It was like adding a full-time employee."

Vantage also made an immediate impact on Dickinson Wright's bottom line. Kolb estimates the company realized a six-figure ROI by solving the VoIP problems and allowing the lawyers to do their jobs without facing technology issues.

In addition to adding to the company's bottom line, Kolb also noticed increased productivity from his IT staff-and a much-needed morale boost. "The notifications help the staff, as opposed to having users calling and yelling at you," he says. "Now you have a lawyer call with a phone issue and you can say, 'We just took care of that. You should be OK in a few seconds.' That's a more positive situation than just getting a negative call from a frustrated lawyer."

Kolb says many of his IT colleagues in the legal profession are facing similar phone and communications issues that could be solved by using Vantage. "If you talked to a lot of law firms that are running VoIP phones, a lot of them aren't happy," he says. "That's because they haven't identified the problems. We have, so it's no longer an issue."

Getting the Full Value from Compuware Vantage

Dickinson Wright built on its success with Vantage by expanding the use of the suite to the pre-production environment. The company uses the service assurance capabilities for performance testing on its document management system. In doing so, Dickinson Wright can ensure that new versions of the application will meet service levels before they go live.

The network performance management capabilities are also used at Dickinson Wright. They allow Kolb and his staff to monitor the flow of data between the company's six offices, and give them the ability to see where data bottlenecks are occurring, and how they can be fixed.

For example, many of Dickinson Wright's lawyers rely upon mobile e-mail through their BlackBerry devices. When the company added real-time calendar functions for BlackBerry users, the Washington D.C. office was hit with data slowdowns. Kolb and his team used Vantage to discover the D.C. office was generating the third-highest level of data traffic in the firm-despite being Dickinson Wright's smallest office. Vantage gave the IT staff the visibility into the servers that was needed to see where in the network the problem was taking place, making it much easier to fix.

Kolb notes Vantage has freed his staff from many mundane monitoring tasks, allowing the freedom to work on creating applications-like the 250 Lotus Notes applications his staff has written-that will, in turn, help the company's lawyers be more productive and generate more revenue. "If all we were able to do is monitor systems we would never have the time to develop and grow the business from the technical side," Kolb says. "If you're in a technical environment and don't have any monitoring or notification anywhere on site, you're asking for trouble. Vantage allows us to do wonderful things in terms of monitoring business-critical apps."