Morgan Cole is a national law firm, providing dedicated and focused legal advice across a number of specialist areas including Banking and Finance, Commerce, Commercial Property and Corporate Law. The firm has a UK-wide reputation not just for technical legal excellence, but also for providing creative and practical legal advice, with an added focus on transparency and service excellence.

Securing the business evolution of Morgan Cole means creating the ability to connect the business with its clients, no matter what; it means attracting, motivating and retaining the best staff, by providing an enabling and flexible working environment; and it means leveraging new technologies to constantly improve customer experience and value.

The brief 

A planned refresh of the communications infrastructure at Morgan Cole gave Catherine Baker, Infrastructure Deliver Manager, an opportunity to look to the future. Her ambition was to avoid a simple like-for-like replacement strategy, and instead create a solution that could evolve and adapt to the current and future needs of the firm.

Whatever else the new solution might be capable of, it would always have to deliver some fundamental benefits: a compelling ROI; increased availability; and added flexibility. Morgan Cole had experienced outages with its old solutions, leaving the firm incommunicado, and so the new solution would need to provide greatly enhanced resilience. This also mean that Morgan Cole was looking for a solutions partner with a customer service ethic to match their own levels of service excellence. The old solution also made any kind of change difficult and protracted, and this had to be remedied.

Morgan Cole prides itself on being able to provide a universe of legal advice at a local level, delivered from its network of six offices. The ability for subject matter experts to base themselves from any location, from home, or even a client's offices, is key to this delivery strategy and places a premium of hot desking and flexible working within the communications framework.

Additionally, Morgan Cole had recognised the potential economies of scale of a fully converged, pure-IP infrastructure and services, delivered by a single solution partner. This included the data centre infrastructure, office LAN's, the wide area network and telephony systems.

Finally, Morgan Cole is a law firm, with no ambitions to be an IT consultancy. Consequently, everything about  the new solution, from the design, through operations to support, needed to deliver efficiency and simplicity.

Creating a Communications Environment 

A Scalable solution is always more than a communications infrastructure; the goal is to create a complete `communications environment'; one which enhances and protects the business's primary processes. The foundation is a secure infrastructure, delivering cost savings and performance increases. On top of that, a layer of agile services is closely mapped to core business processes. Finally there is a level of knowledge sharing and ongoing collaboration to ensure the future health of both the solution and the relationship.

Secure Infrastructure 

Switching is provided by Extreme Networks. The blend of very high performance, resilient configuration, QoS provisioning and manageability provides high availability and future-proofing. Black Diamond series switches are deployed at the data centre, whilst the X450 series provide the backbone of the corporate LAN's. At the network edge, the X250 series adds flexibility and security. Mitel provide the voice services platform. Its highly developed and converged voice applications, running on the 3300 IP Communications Platform, deliver the functionality and agility needed to craft a wealth of value added communications services. For resilience purposes, a 3300 is deployed at every office location. In addition, a Mitel Border Gateway is installed, as a secure platform for advanced teleworking.

Agile Services 

Core to the Morgan Cole ethos is that its services need to be continuously available to clients, even when cisrcumstances conspire to make that very difficult. The ability to work through the kinds of incidents that would stop other businesses in their tracks is made possible in part by a very resilient infrastructure - for example with a Mitel 3300 ICP at every office - and partly by a suite of network services designed to make that resilience accessible, simple to use, and affordable to implement. So the disaster recovery service has been engineered using Mitel's nattily named `External Hot Desking' capability; which enables up to 150 lawyers to receive their voice services on any phone they happen to have handy (including mobiles, of course), and at any location. However, this same technology also underpins the flexible working service, enabling lawyers to work from home, any corporate location, or at a client's office: that's two for the price of one , so to speak.

Staying with the themes of contactability and accountability; a new voicemail service has been integrated into the new solution, uniting fixed and mobile voice services and unlocking a suite of productivity benefits from unified messaging. It is a Mitel platform once again, and the solution is hosted in the Morgan Cole data centre.

Lastly, the internal IT help desk, which keeps Morgan Cole's fee earners as productive as possible, has benefited from a contact centre solution, once gain engineered on the 3300 ICP. Utilising expert queuing, presence and a suite of management tools, it enables help desk manager David Elms to deliver great service - and prove it.

Knowledge and Collaboration 

"The integration and configuration of the system was excellent. When Scalable came on site the  lead engineers worked really closely with our technical team, making sure that the solution that we ended up with is the right one for the business." said Catherine Baker.

By pooling knowledge, sharing common goals and managing the ongoing collaboration, Scalable was able to deliver added value in the form of enhanced performance and continuous evolution of the communications environment.

Just one example: using a wealth of experience and a practised, consultative approach, Scalable's lead engineer was able to take Morgan Cole through the process of discovering which telephony options and configurations best suited a legal firm of their scope and size.This process paid close attention to minimising the user's retraining time on switch over.

Moving forward, that same lead implementation engineer is now appointed as lead support engineer, carrying forward all of the knowledge gained. Proactively, he visits Morgan Cole once per quarter to check on system progress, provide updates on technology developments, and discusses new requirements.

Return on Investment 

"The board had to approve the funding, so we needed to demonstrate a very direct and immediate RoI." Geoff Wright, IT Director (and budget holder).

The least you should expect from a Scalable communications infrastructure is ongoing cost savings to match the performance enhancements. Morgan Cole was immediately able to realise a £37,000 saving in maintenance costs, ongoing. Scalable's ability to react quickly to bring the new system online additionally removed the need for a £150,000 orphaned investment in the old solution. Lastly, Scalable was able to identify future capital savings of approximately £150,000 from ongoing equipment refresh.