Ensuring reliability and instant connection across Fox Rothschild’s 29 U.S. law offices.

Established in 1907, Fox Rothschild is a full-service, Philadelphia-headquartered law firm with 29 offices throughout the United States. The firm boasts approximately 2,000 employees (1,000 attorneys) who provide more than 70 diverse legal services to clients dealing with litigation, real estate, intellectual property, insolvency, personal investments, and more.

Before incorporating the Webex Suite and Cisco devices into its daily operations throughout its nationwide offices, Fox Rothschild faced a few challenges:

• An increase in need for devices with interoperability to support meetings hosted by variety of video conferencing too
• Unreliable technology in conference room
• Optimizing the meeting room experience after the firm’s return to the office

"We noticed feedback from our attorneys where they were receiving more and more requests from their clients and the courts to have meetings on other platforms," Kevin Smith, Director of Infrastructure Architecture at Fox Rothschild, said. "We needed to be able to adjust and accommodate them."

On top of scattered expectations regarding video conferencing platforms, Fox Rothschild’s conference rooms were outfitted with legacy tech that was becoming increasingly unreliable.

Meeting spaces throughout the office had started to build a negative reputation for their ability to connect—and stay connected—during calls.

While some Fox Rothschild associates utilized laptops during meetings, it created a disconnect between participants and cluttered conference room tables during meetings.

"We noticed that a lot of people got used to using and attending meetings on their laptops," Smith said. "When they walked into a conference room, everybody walked in with a laptop. So, if you have 10 people in the room, there are 10 laptops. It didn’t look good. Looking through a laptop camera is adequate and it works, but we wanted to make sure we were providing the best experience possible."

Determined to provide the best experience possible for employees and clients, Fox Rothschild began by updating its conference room technology.

"We wanted to replace some of our legacy equipment with standardized solutions that would be easy to deploy, manage, and use - in any meeting. We have been able to do that with our the Cisco Room Bar and Room Kit Pro, enabling us to quickly ramp-up the number of workspaces that are video-enabled for hybrid work, providing a consistent experience for our employees," Smith said, who appreciates the simplicity of the devices and how easy it is for attorneys to join meetings.

Implementing Cisco devices into its conference rooms has been a game-changer for the Fox Rothschild team. Many of Fox Rothschild's attorneys often need to meet their clients on other meeting platforms, including Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or Google Meetings. With One Button to Join, the firm’s attorneys can easily join any meeting, saving them time and creating a seamless client experience.

"It’s really simple [to use the Room Bars]. [Our attorneys] are able to walk into a conference room, hit the join button on the navigator, and connect to that room immediately," he said. "The important thing is that we know it’s going to work the first time, every time."

The Webex Suite has become the go-to solution for Fox Rothschild, whose more than 2,000 employees rely on Webex Meetings, Webex Messaging and, in due time, Webex Calling, to connect internal and external stakeholders on an international level.

"We use almost all aspects of the Suite, and we’re in the process of moving to Webex Calling; 3,000 phones we’re in the process of switching over,” Smith said.

Webex Messaging enables the reliable, instantaneous communication that Fox Rothschild sought to achieve.

"We have about 1,500 users that use Webex Messaging on a day-to-day basis," Smith said. "There’s a large number of departments that couldn’t survive without Webex Messaging."

As for meetings, the law firm hosts a lot of them; just shy of 10,000 per month across the U.S. and internationally.

"Webex Meetings has been the backbone of what we’ve done for a number of years," Smith said. And, when it comes to communicating with clients around the world, Fox Rothschild plans to leverage the built-in translation feature in Webex to increase the quality of their communication.

"We have a number of international clients, so we've taken the opportunity to use the translation feature [in Webex] to help us better communicate with those clients,” Smith said.

Between meetings and messaging alone, Fox Rothschild racks up more than 350,000 minutes per month, which is bound to increase when Webex Calling is fully deployed across its 29 U.S. offices.

But perhaps the most important aspect of the Webex Suite for the firm is that it’s easy to use from both user and admin perspectives.

"Even though we host about 9,000 meetings a month, all of our Webex environments and our 150 conference rooms are supported by 3 people," Smith said.

Fox Rothschild’s marketing department also uses Webex Webinars  and Webex Events to engage current and prospective clients.

"We use Webinars a lot," Smith said. "Our marketing department runs a lot of webinars to try and attract new clients. Internally, we use it whenever we’re running town hall meetings."

When it’s time to attend an in-person event, the team uses Webex Events Check-in and Badge Printing on-premise event solutions to streamline administrative processes and disseminate important information to new leads and potential clients.

"Our marketing department uses Webex Events, predominantly when they’re doing on-premise events," Smith said. "They use it for printing name badges and providing all essential information to potential clients that are looking for our services."

Looking toward the future, Fox Rothschild is eager to continue tapping into Webex’s interoperability and AI features that allow its attorneys to seamlessly communicate with clients and drive operational efficiencies.

“We’re really looking forward to a lot of the enhancements [that are] going to come along with interoperability. That ability to connect to other platforms such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom is important to us. We can't dictate what our clients and what the courts are using, so that's important for us,” Smith said. “Also the enhancements [that are] coming along with AI… that ability to do things simpler and quicker moving forward is really important to us.”

Together, the Webex Suite and Cisco devices provide a highly functional and flexible solution that provides reliable collaboration solutions to organizations of all types and sizes. The Webex Suite includes solutions for:

• Meetings
• Calling
• Messaging
• Webinars
• Events
• Video Messaging
• Polling
• Whiteboarding

Ready to simplify your communications with cloud-based solutions that deliver? Contact our team of experts today.