Thompson Law
Growing Law Firm Leverages RingCentral Cloud Communications to Improve Operations and the Client Experience
Our staff really appreciates many of the cloud communications features they now have for the first time thanks to RingCentral, like the ability to send and receive faxes digitally using their business phone numbers and receiving transcripts of their voicemails.
Kirk Lee
IT Consulting Partner, Thompson Law
Since its founding in 2017, Thompson Law LLP has won more than $1.8 billion for its personal injury clients. So it’s no surprise that the firm’s attorneys have been named to the “Texas Super Lawyers” list. That track record has helped the firm expand rapidly, growing from just 10 employees to more than 70 in under two years.
Although the firm was thrilled that its quick growth meant the ability to help more injury victims, the ever-increasing attention and interest Thompson Law was receiving also created technical challenges for its staff. To continue delivering the outstanding service the firm prides itself on, Thompson Law needed a better phone system than the legacy, on-premises PBX system it started with.
INDUSTRY
Legal
HQ
Dallas, TX
YEAR FOUNDED
2017
EMPLOYEES
70+
Call volume was overwhelming the firm’s on-premises phone system
“In a way, Thompson Law was a victim of its early success,” says Kirk Lee, IT consultant for Thompson Law and the owner of Trendi Marketing, a digital marketing firm for personal injury lawyers. “When founder Ryan Thompson started the firm, he and his small team quickly earned a reputation of winning for their injury clients. That led to an exponential increase in prospect calls, and our on-site phone system couldn’t handle the volume.”
Actually, call volume was just one of many challenges. “We also had downtime problems,” Lee explains. “Because everything ran through the PBX, if we lost power at the office, we’d lose our entire phone system. This firm lives by its ability to stay accessible to clients and prospects. If we don’t have a working phone system, then we’re not getting cases.”
“Then there were the other hassles and costs that come with managing a traditional phone system in house. We faced licensing expenses as the staff expanded. Also, we had poor support from our provider’s third-party vendor. When we needed to upgrade phones or add new ones, for example, the support agency insisted on doing it overnight or on a weekend when our IT team couldn’t oversee the transition. We just had to cross our fingers and hope it worked.”
What created the biggest problems for the firm were the routing issues. This firm gets a massive amount of calls all day from prospects, clients, and opposing parties’ attorneys. Not being able to efficiently route calls was causing problems for staff. “Because we didn’t have much of a routing feature, most calls went straight to our receptionists. We were overwhelming our front-desk staff with transferring calls, and not creating a great experience for callers. Worse, this process was so inefficient that we had to pay for a third-party call center to handle overflow.”
Eventually, Ryan Thompson, the firm’s founder and managing partner, had had enough. “He came to me and said, ‘Kirk, you’ve worked for prominent firms before. What do you think we should do?’”
The tech team proposes a cloud communications solution
Lee worked with Kyle Burt, a technology advisor and owner of the IT consultancy CatchCloud.com, to find a solution for Thompson Law’s communications needs.
“At first I was nervous about moving all of this functionality to the cloud,” Lee recalls. “I had never been responsible for a phone system where I wasn’t monitoring the brains on-prem. But we knew RingCentral’s reputation and that the solution had built-in redundancies. So, we gave it a shot. What a great decision that turned out to be!”
We were able to integrate [RingCentral] Contact Center with our case management platform to automatically direct an existing client to the attorneys or support staff handling that specific case. That means a better client experience and lightening the call loads of our busy receptionists.
Kirk Lee
IT Consulting Partner, Thompson Law
RingCentral deployment leads to enormous business benefits
“The first benefit we saw immediately: a smooth and easy migration,” says Lee. “We were a little worried that switching phone systems might trigger resistance from the staff or disrupt peoples’ workflows. Nope. I’d say within a week or so, everyone was comfortably up and running on the RingCentral cloud solution.”
“Also, we don’t have downtime issues anymore. As mission-critical as a reliable phone system is to our operations, that benefit alone would’ve made migrating to RingCentral worth it. But fortunately, that’s not even close to the only benefit.”
When they added RingCentral Contact Center™ to the initial rollout of RingEX™, the team at Thompson Law found they finally had the intelligent, data-driven routing capability they wanted. “To give you just one example of how we’re benefiting from this,” explains Lee, “we were able to integrate Contact Center with our case management platform to automatically direct an existing client to the attorneys or support staff handling that specific case. That means a better client experience and lightening the call loads of our busy receptionists.”
The routing capabilities of RingCentral Contact Center have also made call management much more efficient and cost-effective. “We route inbound prospect calls to our Intake Phase 1 team of experts,” explains Lee, “and when that queue is full, we’re able to automatically send overflow calls to second, third, and even fourth-level teams. This let us finally eliminate that expensive third-party call center bill.”
The attorneys are also now able to communicate with clients via text message using their Thompson Law business numbers and not their personal mobile phone numbers. “That’s been great all around. It helps keep our clients better informed at every stage, lets our lawyers communicate with clients without giving out their personal cell numbers, and also reduces the number of calls from clients who want more frequent status updates on their cases.”
“Our staff really appreciates many of the cloud communications features they now have for the first time thanks to RingCentral, like the ability to send and receive faxes digitally using their business phone numbers and receiving transcripts of their voicemails.”
From a resource-allocation standpoint, for the first time since launching Thompson Law, Ryan Thompson now has full visibility into the firm’s inbound calls, including which calls are being answered by the receptionists, which are being answered by the firm’s Intake Phase 1 team, and which are being routed elsewhere. “With that data, Ryan and his team are able to identify potential problems in call flow immediately, and it helps them make informed management decisions about when it’s time to hire more support staff.”