Making the Case for Migration: Hawley Troxell’s Journey from Legacy PBX to Zoom Phone

Headquartered in Boise, Hawley Troxell is Idaho’s largest full-service business law firm, serving local and international clients since 1964. The firm employs over 70 attorneys in its Boise, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho Falls, Pocatello, and Reno offices.

As Hawley Troxell continued to grow and expand its legal practices, it became evident that the firm’s outdated phone system needed some attention. Its legacy platform was showing its age and was not delivering the level of usability and manageability that was required by a state-of-the-art law firm.  

The verdict is in — an aging phone system is out

Paul Wilch, Hawley Troxell’s IT manager, was tasked with examining the company’s outdated on-prem PBX system that was maintained by a local managed service provider (MSP). With security, reliability, and simplicity in mind, he knew a change was in order.

Hawley Troxell had been with the same MSP for over 20 years and relied on them to manage their aging Mitel phone system, which was 15 years old. Since the Mitel phone system was outdated, the process to acquire new licenses, get security updates, and deploy new phones took more time than Wilch wanted to spend. “We weren’t able to deploy phones to our remote users without opening a lot of ports on our firewalls, so we ended up buying a few phone licenses on a different VOIP system.” 

As Wilch looked into other modern phone solutions, he realized that he didn’t want his team to ever have to deal with on-prem systems again. During his research and evaluation of new phone systems, Wilch’s existing relationship with Zoom led him to consider Zoom Phone. Since the firm’s attorneys and staff had already been successfully using Zoom Meetings, it was an easy decision to evaluate Zoom Phone.

To test the system’s ease of use, Wilch turned to some of his firm’s power users and more technical people. “I wanted to see how easy it was for them to learn the Zoom Phone system, so we gave them access, but limited instructions,” said Wilch.”People had no problem figuring out Zoom’s softphone because the interface was so intuitive, and online training was simple to find by just doing a search under ‘Zoom training.’”

Wilch discovered other things that he enjoyed about Zoom Phone. “It’s easy to access information about new features and security updates by searching on ‘Zoom Phone updates.’ With other phone systems I evaluated, information was harder to find and much more limited.” After Wilch did a thorough comparison of options, he presented the data to his firm’s COO/CFO. From there, the decision was clear — Hawley Troxell chose Zoom as their next phone system. “The more I learned about Zoom Phone and how Zoom could help our firm achieve a mobile workforce, it was clear that [it] was what we needed,” Wilch explained.

Simple deployment means fast adoption

Ease of deployment and total control of the phone system were two very important factors to Wilch, who had the sole responsibility for the transition from PBX to Zoom Phone. Other phone systems that were evaluated by his team offered limited control and admin privileges. “We wanted full control of our system without the need to rely on others to make changes to our phones,” said Wilch. 

Deploying physical phones to the homes of some of the firm’s employees was also easy with Zoom Phone because Wilch was able to provision each phone at the main office, then send it to the employee’s residence. “It was pretty much plug-and-play when our attorneys received the phones. There was no need to configure firewalls or routers at their homes or in our offices. Once the attorney’s ‘work from home’ phone was plugged in, we could manage it from anywhere.”

Zoom Phone delivers a reliable, quality experience 

Wilch says that Hawley Troxell’s attorneys and staff have embraced the change to Zoom Phone. When he started the Zoom Phone roll out to the law firm offices, most employees only used physical desk phones. That’s not the case anymore. 

“I see different examples of the positive impact that Zoom Phone has had here,” said Wilch. “I helped one of our attorneys install Zoom Phone on his mobile phone. About a week later, he said he was rushing back from a game with his kids and was able to take a client call as he was walking in his front door. He made a point of telling me how great he thought it was that he was able to receive an important client call as if he were at his office desk. With Zoom Phone, our attorneys can make and receive calls anytime, no matter where they are.”

Ruling in Favor of the Zoom Phone API

To accurately bill their clients, attorneys need to be able to keep track of every interaction they have with them. By leveraging the Zoom Phone API, Wilch was able to create a Python program to get Zoom Phone call logs and save them to a file so the firm’s accounting system could verify billing entries. “I’m not a programmer, but my Zoom customer success manager provided me with a snippet of code that pointed me in the right direction,” said Wilch. “Later, I got help with the code and now I’m able to easily pull an entire day’s call log in to our accounting system. I can see how other law firms and businesses are going to appreciate Zoom Phone’s API and extensive documentation.”

In summation: Zoom Phone prevails for enhanced communications

By liberating Hawley Troxell from the shackles of its limited legacy PBX system, Zoom Phone has enabled the law firm’s employees to enjoy the benefits of telephony freedom, reliability, and ease of use. 

With Zoom Meetings, Zoom Rooms, and Zoom Phone, Hawley Troxell’s IT is now able to fully support its lawyers and staff by giving them access to flexible and reliable communication capabilities and streaming processes, improving client collaboration as a result. The Zoom UCaaS platform, combining a VoIP phone service, video conferencing meetings, video-enabled conference rooms, chat, and more, rests its case.

If you’d like to learn more about Zoom Phone and the benefits of a video-first unified communications platform, sign up for a one-on-one customized demo with a Zoom product specialist today!