Jacoby & Meyers
RingCentral helped southern California’s #1 personal injury law firm cut its phone bill in half
250
employees worldwide now unified on a single cloud communications platform
50%
savings in telecom costs since switching to RingCentral
1
day to move all phone lines to RingCentral—with no workflow disruptions
Now that I have every form of business communication I need on the RingCentral app—phone, text, team messaging, video, fax—I’m using my business phone number all the time. Having this app is helping me stay more connected than ever to my team and clients.
Michael Akiva
Managing Partner
A 50-year track record of helping injured parties get justice
Jacoby & Meyers revolutionized personal injury law a half-century ago with a simple promise to every client: We won’t get paid until you do. With that unique business model, the firm changed the industry by empowering any victim of third-party negligence to navigate the complex legal system and seek the justice and compensation they deserved.
Today, Jacoby & Meyers is one of the most successful and sought-after law firms in the United States. The firm has recovered more than a billion dollars for its clients. And in 2019, 2020 and 2021, readers of The Los Angeles Daily News voted Jacoby & Meyers both the #1 Best Personal Injury Attorneys and the #1 Favorite Accident Attorneys.
INDUSTRY
Law practice
HQ
Los Angeles, CA
YEAR FOUNDED
1972
EMPLOYEES
250
Outgrowing a legacy phone system
Michael Akiva, Managing Partner of Jacoby & Meyers, explains that the firm’s rapid growth in recent years placed increasing pressure on its longstanding phone system. “The story played out the same way repeatedly,” he says. “We’d ask our phone vendor if the system would let us do X, and they’d say, ‘No, we don’t have X. But it’s a great idea, and we’ll add it to our roadmap.’”
In fact, Michael adds, the vendor did build some of the tools Jacoby & Meyers requested. But those additions didn’t fully solve the firm’s challenges. “I think the suggestions we made helped the company build a better system. But we didn’t want to be pulling our phone vendor along to keep up with our needs. We wanted a solution that had everything we needed right out of the gate—and that actually pushed us forward.”
Receiving multiple RingCentral recommendations from trusted colleagues
While Michael and his technology team were investigating a different phone system, he spoke with partners at two law firms—both of whom were having positive experiences with RingCentral.
“RingCentral sounded great based on the success my colleagues were having with it. But I’m not the telephony expert at our firm, so I asked my CTO to do his research. He came back to me and said, ‘This system has everything we need.’”
Enjoying significant operational improvements
As Michael points out, migrating his nationwide 250-person staff to the cloud-based RingCentral platform led to several benefits immediately.
“One huge advantage of having RingCentral was the ability to give our clients a single number to reach us—however they preferred, and wherever we happened to be. Before RingCentral, we had one number for texts, a desktop phone line, and a separate line for faxing. Clients needed all three numbers depending on how they wanted to communicate. Now, they can reach us through all those methods from one number. That’s letting us improve our client experience.”
What I appreciate more than anything about RingCentral is the flexibility it gives our team and our clients. Some employees want to use their cell phones to make and receive business calls, and others prefer to have those calls on their computers. Some clients want to speak with their attorneys by phone, others like to text, and some prefer to have video calls. RingCentral lets us do all of this, from anywhere.
Michael Akiva
Managing Partner
Michael also notes that RingCentral helps streamline internal communications—which is becoming increasingly important as the firm continues to grow. “To reach a coworker using our old system, I’d have to find their extension in a spreadsheet. Now I can just type the person’s name in the RingCentral app, click their extension when it pops up, and get connected.”
I can’t believe how smooth our RingCentral implementation was. My partners and I were preparing for, at best, a short period of telephony chaos. How can you move 250 people to a new phone system and not have some disruption to people’s workflows? But we didn’t. RingCentral just started working right away.
Michael Akiva
Managing Partner
Saving substantially on telephony
Although cost savings wasn’t even a major consideration in the firm’s decision to move to RingCentral, Michael explains that the migration actually led to a significant reduction in overall telephony expenses.
Because our old phone system needed so much work to meet our needs, we had to pay for a lot of add-ons and customization. That added up so much, in fact, that by the time we managed to consolidate all of these communication services onto one platform, we realized that RingCentral was slashing our overall phone costs by 50%.
Michael Akiva
Managing Partner