As the way legal firms deliver services to clients, Dentons US LLP (Dentons) is leading the way in advances, harnessing new collaborative technologies. Dentons challenges the statues quo while delivering consistent and uncompromising quality to its clients. What makes Dentons so different is that it has no single headquarters and no dominant culture. Diverse in terms of geography, language and nationalities, the firm offers equally diverse clients expertise with deep experience in worldwide legal traditions. But, this business model does create a complicated communications infrastructure. For example, a recent merger with McKenna, Long and Aldrich (MLA) presented a challenge for Dentons’ IT staff. With the merger, MLA was bringing its own company directory. How could the staff find a way to unify two distinct communications directories? “After the merger, we were still two distinct firms, with two distinct directories; we were using two separate data sources,” explains Phil Nevins, Infrastructure and Voice Lead Engineer at Dentons. For example, someone at a New York City legacy MLA office was unable to easily search a company phone directory for a contact at one of the legacy Dentons offices.
The Search Begins for a Directory Solution
While at a Unified Communications industry event, Dentons learned about Akkadian Labs’ software solution. After researching our mobile contact manager and a second solution, Dentons was swayed by Akkadian Labs’ responsiveness. “Akkadian Labs responded immediately and the competitor did not,” said Nevins. One feature that attracted Nevins is that Akkadian Contact Manager allows Dentons team members to easily search and pull information from several different directories, regardless of the office locations. “After the implementation of Akkadian Contact Manager, we are now able to search for users within the entire enterprise,” said Nevins. “The search pulls the necessary information from various data sources, no matter which type, and then allows our internal personnel to find each other quickly to initiate a phone conversation.”
Creating a Business Case for Akkadian Contact Manager
After finding Akkadian Contact Manager to be the right solution, Dentons needed to put together a business case in order to move forward with acquiring the software. The first step for the team was to show how adding Akkadian Contact Manager to Dentons’ communications system could save time. “We had C-level people who could not find other C-level people through the native directory that was embedded within our Cisco Unified Communications platform. There was no way to look them up via the phone. Now, they can search via Akkadian Contact Manager and find anyone. Problem solved. Easy sell. Time is money,” said Nevins.
Implementing the Software Solution
Dentons started off with a free, 30-day trial of the software. Akkadian Labs sales and technical teams assisted with the trial setup and overall deployment. “The software is fantastic, simple to install, configure and use,” said Nevins. With a solid solution in place for Dentons unique business structure, Dentons is considering additional deployments of Akkadian Contact Manager in Canada.
