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Keeping up with on-the-go attorneys

As far back as 1995, the management of Los Angeles-based law firm Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLP knew it had to furnish its attorneys with a way to stay productive while visiting scores of clients and traveling between sites, including the firm's nine offices.Until 1999, the preferred method of communication was the laptop computer.
Written by Karen D. Schwartz, Contributor
As far back as 1995, the management of Los Angeles-based law firm Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLP knew it had to furnish its attorneys with a way to stay productive while visiting scores of clients and traveling between sites, including the firm's nine offices.

Until 1999, the preferred method of communication was the laptop computer. Attorneys were issued IBM Thinkpad 600 series notebooks from which they could send and access documents and receive and send e-mail, voice mail, and faxes. But when a committee of senior partners decided in 1999 to implement unified messaging, it also chose to first deploy wireless devices to most of the organization's 800 lawyers. After evaluating wireless devices from Palm Inc. and MobileComm, the team chose the RIM BlackBerry 957 because it allowed for real-time e-mail directly from Exchange, which no other vendor provided at the time.

"We made a strategic decision to deploy the BlackBerry first and then quickly deploy unified messaging after that," says CIO Mary Odson. "That way, it might address the concerns some attorneys had about unified messaging taking away the familiar red light on their phones when they got voice mail, because they could immediately see on the BlackBerry that they had received a voice message."

Today, attorneys in eight of the firm's nine offices use BlackBerry devices to send and obtain real-time information to and from each other, customers, and headquarters. The next step is to outfit the company's Tokyo office with the capability--something Odson says the company is waiting for Research In Motion, manufacturer of the BlackBerry, to offer. Currently, BlackBerries are available only in Canada, the United States, and Mexico, and are just beginning to enter the United Kingdom. RIM's deployment to Asia has not yet begun.

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