Riemer & Braunstein LLP, a 77-year old Boston-based law firm specializing in banking and finance, real estate, litigation, bankruptcy, corporate, and trusts and estates, faced a communications conundrum. According to Bruce Bial, Firm Administrator/IT Director at Riemer & Braunstein, large deals, often involving more than one law firm and other stakeholders, require Riemer & Braunstein to compile and distribute voluminous documentation and financial information, all of which must be encrypted to ensure security. “Situations arise in which several parties must have information now,” Bial said. “Especially in that kind of situation, computer users intuitively want to send the information via e-mail as the easiest and most immediate way to satisfy the request.”
Bial added, “we wanted to find a way to help our internal constituents – 100 attorneys, paralegals, support staff, and hundreds of clients – use a familiar, well-understood ‘old’ technology like e-mail to send documents of all sizes securely and quickly without going through any training.” Bial and his team put considerable time and effort into assisting with high-priority and urgent situations, breaking documents into smaller files to be e-mailed separately. This might occur ten or fifteen times per day, often involving multiple large documents and attachments. Between multiple copies of sent e-mails and “bounce backs,” which often took 24 hours to return, the e-mail server wasted considerable processing time and users were extremely frustrated. Senders didn’t know if their e-mail was received, and recipients, often failing to realize they were receiving an e-mail, would miss the documents. “We had to go into Exchange to find out the size of a document we knew had been sent and then ask a recipient how large a document his network could accommodate before the system rejected it,” Bial noted. “This put an onus on the attorney sending the information. We knew there had to be a better way.”
Bial approached Steve Gershman, the firm’s trusted IT consulting partner and Director of Integration Services at TOSS Corporation. Understanding the dynamics of the legal IT environment, Gershman recommended a trial of the Biscom Delivery Server (BDS). “After reviewing many solutions, I realized that the BDS server offered everything R&B needed – the ability for users to send emails of any size to external recipients, with no IT involvement, and minimal setup and training time. From an IT perspective, the solution took a heavy burden off of the firm’s Exchange and SAN systems and was affordable,” said Gershman. Bial agreed, and found BDS so easy to implement and use that he purchased it within a week; the product sold itself.
“We used a key metrics checklist during our evaluation. First, the product had to be easy to use for both attorneys and clients. They are most comfortable with e-mail, and the BDS Outlook plug-in automates the process. The attorney never has to worry that his document will bounce back,” Bial reported. “In addition, we can allow clients access to the BDS system as restricted guests – to send document back into Riemer & Braunstein – without requiring extra licenses. BDS automatically determines through its policies whether an outbound e-mail goes directly to the client through Exchange or through the BDS server – we direct any emails over 10 MB through BDS – and then BDS notifies the sender that it arrived and was downloaded and opened.
“Second, we wanted a product that could scale. By setting up group policies, we just add new users depending on need. Remote users on travel who use laptops and log into the Citrix server farm found BDS made their lives easier too. So now, when clients send those ‘I-need-it-yesterday’ requests, we can respond immediately, without worrying about how many or what size docs we send.
“Third, IT wanted a product that was easy to install. We got BDS up and running literally in minutes, which saved us time and money in terms of installation and setup charges.”
By Guest Blogger: Biscom
