Zoom’s Unified Communications Platform ‘Wows’ Stevens & Bolton with Ease of Use

Stevens & Bolton, a leading UK law firm, has been providing exceptional legal assistance to its clients for the last 150 years. Attorneys at Stevens & Bolton are highly experienced and have a wide range of expertise including banking, finance, real estate, commercial, and regulatory law. The firm works with large companies all over the world; however, it also specializes in working with individual clients in areas such as employment, family law, immigration, and taxation.

With a philosophy based on empathy, excellence, and providing realistic, decisive advice, Stevens & Bolton has built a reputation as a highly experienced and effective law firm across the globe.

Seamless communication during COVID-19

Stevens & Bolton frequently leveraged video communications as a way to communicate and collaborate with its clients. However, the firm did not have a chosen a preferred video communications platform, instead communicating based on their clients’ preferences.

“Our people were using all the popular UCaaS platforms, so we were pretty agnostic not having staked our claim,” said David Thomas, Head of IT at Stevens & Bolton.

However, as the pandemic began sweeping across Europe and the rest of the world, the need for a reliable and scalable firm-wide communications solution intensified. As a firm Stevens & Bolton had always encouraged in-person meetings with colleagues, and they were faced with having to switch to online meetings very quickly.

“We started to hear that things were escalating in northern Italy, and within a few weeks we were all working remotely,” Thomas said. “In those first few days, before we sent our people home to work remotely, we needed to make a choice. Internally, we had been testing Microsoft Teams with 10% of our people, so it would have been the obvious choice. We knew the key to success would be an intuitive user interface experience, and that this would ensure an efficient transition to online meetings. We chose Zoom mainly because there no real learning curve and our people got it straight away, no matter what their aversion to technology. We knew that this was also true of the back-end management portal, and our IT engineers quickly mastered automation and integration with our existing systems.”

Soon thereafter, Stevens & Bolton began evaluating Zoom Phone, with a view to replacing their traditional legacy telephone system.

“We had previously looked at other solutions, including RingCentral and Fuze, although for various reasons they weren’t quite right for us at the time,” Thomas said.

“Additionally, we were attracted to a cloud telephony platform that didn’t require SIP trunks, with potential single-points-of-failure, or SIP middlemen because Zoom Phone is a truly global telephone provider,” Thomas added.

Unexpected savings

“We also learned that we could achieve savings with Zoom Phone over the leading alternatives, and significant savings over our existing telephone system,” Thomas added.

Thomas discussed implementing Zoom Phone with the leadership at Stevens & Bolton, and the advantages of the Zoom platform quickly became clear. The lawyers and support staff found that Zoom Phone streamlined collaboration with an intuitive and seamless communications experience.

“The Microsoft Outlook integration for Zoom Phone is great because all your Outlook contacts become available in Zoom Phone,” Thomas said. “One of our lawyers has over 3,500 Outlook contacts and loves the ability to easily dial them.”

Zoom Phone’s elevate-to-meeting capability makes collaboration simple. “Our people love this feature, the ability to convert a phone call into a meeting with a single click is incredibly useful and the telephone participants are converted seamlessly.”

“The IT team also loves the fact that anyone, no matter how junior, can safely hop into Zoom Phone’s back-end management interface without breaking anything. It is very user-friendly on all fronts and easy to manage,” Thomas added.

The teams at Stevens & Bolton are also leveraging Zoom-native hardware to create an effective and seamless user experience.

“In addition to the physical Poly meeting room phones, we have deployed Neat Bars with Neat Pads to improve our large meeting room video conferencing capability. The Neat Bar microphone audio pickup blew us away, and we’ve not had to invest in additional satellite microphones to ensure voices are heard.” Thomas said.

The firm has also implemented Zoom Webinars to support both internal as well as external communication including client webinars. “We liked the webinar attendee registration and vetting features that Zoom Webinars offers,” Thomas said. “We also use Zoom Webinars for company-wide communications.”

Building forward with Zoom and Neat 

With Zoom, Stevens & Bolton transitioned seamlessly to a reliable, intuitive, and dynamic communications platform in the midst of the pandemic, allowing the firm to continue delivering exceptional legal advice to its clients.

As attorneys and staff members begin to re-enter the office, Thomas and his teams are looking forward to extending their use of Zoom Rooms with Neat video conferencing hardware to provide a safe and effective meeting room experience for all their people.