April 1997
Law Firm Judges RightFAX
The attorneys at Frilot, Partridge, Kohnke & Clements, LC (FPK&C) in Louisiana knew what they wanted in a fax system when they got together last year. It was a fast, reliable and easy to use local area network fax server. The 23 attorneys brought two years of experience evaluating fax systems when they left Louisiana's fifth largest law firm to strike out on their own.
"We wanted to give our legal secretaries the power to fax a document created at the desktop the same way they printed it," says Richard Pennock, Jr., FPK&C's information systems manager. The firm, which now has 30 lawyers, specializes in litigation before state and federal courts and administrative agencies. FPK&C represents corporations like Aetna, Chevron, Monsanto and Rheem in diverse areas such as maritime law, railroad litigation and labor law who all demand timely and accurate transmission of information.
After examining a number of fax systems, Pennock chose the powerful RightFAX (Tucson, AZ 520-320-7000) local area network fax server because it offered the flexibility needed for desktop faxing under DOS, Windows and OS/2.
The RightFAX server lets users fax directly from any workstation on their network. Users send documents to print queues; RightFAX software then processes the documents and transmits them over telephone lines as faxes.
Attorneys and secretaries at FPK&C say the RightFAX e-mail Gateway gives them important advantages over print drivers. Outbound faxing became easier when secretaries set up distribution databases in cc:Mail or fax, according to the recipients' preferences.
"We've created icons on each desktop to represent files of specific cases," said Pennock. "The icons contain internal and external contacts associated with the files and cases. Fax and e-mail distributions take place simultaneously. Users have latched onto that idea."
RightFAX also solved the inbound fax problem. Instead of having one employee physically distribute hard-copy faxes, attorneys and support staff now have individual Direct Inward Dialing (DID) numbers. Attorneys are informed about incoming faxes with RightFAX's automatic fax notification through their IBM LAN Server and mailing lists on cc:Mail.
"We've created virtual fax mailboxes," said Pennock. "We have an attorney serving as defense counsel liaison on a large case involving 1,500 plaintiffs and several hundred defendants. The court sends him copies of filings, docket updates and calendar changes; he then notifies everyone connected with the case. His DID tells him when the court's fax arrives and forwards the fax through the cc:Mail gateway (which contains the fax / e-mail database), to everyone connected with the case."
Another benefit of the cc:Mail / RightFAX fax server system surfaced when FPK&C installed an Internet server last June. "We wanted to offer non-profit organizations and other community-based clubs space on our Web site," says Pennock. "There were two reasons for this. One was to put more traffic through our site, the other was to give something back to our community. Some of the organizations wanted to put their enrollment information on the Web server, but they didn't have Internet access to capture this information. We helped them create aliases in the cc:Mail fax server that became their fax numbers. When messages are sent from the Web to cc:Mail server addresses, they're automatically forwarded to specific fax machines."
This innovative work occurs on an OS/2 network. FPK&C is running 70 PCs, all 486/DX66's with 16 MB of RAM; 10 of these PCs also run LAN Server. An ALR Symmetric multiprocessing PC (also running LAN Server) works as the server for RightFAX, Lotus Notes, cc:Mail and the Visual Document Library.
The RightFAX server software uses work servers to perform certain tasks, like converting inbound faxes to print jobs that can be sent to a printer, and rasterizing outbound faxes.
"We also use the RightFAX OCR module," added Pennock. This module provides an additional routing method and also converts fax images into dynamic, editable text files which can then be imported into any application.
FPK&C is impressed with the accuracy of RightFAX and the way faxes consistently reach the proper, intended recipients. They also like the easy, desktop faxing from PCs that doesn't requiring printing out hard copies and manually sending them out through standalone fax machines.
And when it comes to reporting, the RightFAX server provides a continuous audit log with time and date stamps for completed tasks like "sent", "received" and "printed".
As for the system's future, Pennock says the company will continue to evolve the product by reengineering pieces of it.
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