Hanefey and King

Background

Hanefey and King is a business litigation and bankruptcy law firm in Boston, Massachusetts. The firm has 65 employees, 30 of whom are attorneys. Hanefey and King maintain communication with thousands of clients. The law firm provides on-going information to all of their clients by letter mail and email.

The Problem

In providing their clients with continual correspondences, HK was confronted with the ongoing problem of random misses in their mailing system. While using an access database, HK was unable to view specific date / time information for any of their communications. They had no means of determining with certainty, who was sent what with regard to specific mailings. When HK would follow-up with clients regarding events and calendaring, very often clients would report never receiving anything at all. HK had no means of determining where in the system the breakdown took place.

Being a Novell shop, Hanefey and King’s operations were tied into Novell GroupWise. HK’s contact management software fell short in categorizing and recording contact information, and equally important, it had no integration capability with Novell GroupWise. The inability to tie-in contact information with their existing email system proved to be a timely and inefficient means of operation. Within the organization there was a general sense that their system was unreliable. And, in their letter mailings they had to rely upon a paper system, generating labels—one for the client, and one for them.

The Solution

With the implementation of GroupLink’s ContactWise Hanefey and King were able to incorporate a system of contact management that facilitated all of their needs. Joe Tuttle is the Director of Information Services for Hanefey and King. “We were in the process of opening a new Practice area and decided that implementing ContactWise at this point in operations would be highly beneficial to us,” said Mr. Tuttle. “We needed a tool that would provide us with the means to send blast emails, and more importantly, a tool that would provide all of our users with specific information on all of our correspondences with out clients. With ContactWise we could track with certainty that a specific message, invitation, etc. was sent to a particular contact. In doing so we eliminated the guess-work on who received, or didn’t receive what.”

“The situation was to the point that when a client didn’t receive something, attorneys within our firm would ultimately wonder what the people in IT had done wrong,” said Mr.Tuttle. “Now we have the ability to see exactly who does or does not have information pertinent to our business operations. And, with that certainty we can view who has confirmed for upcoming events, and more importantly, we can see responses from our contact lists on who responded positively or negatively to our efforts.”

Conclusion

Through the implementation of GroupLink’s ContactWise Hanefey and King have eliminated the guess-work on client correspondence. While before the law firm had no means of substantiating contact information, now employees at Hanefey and King have instant access to contact histories, and specific customer information. With the seamless integration of GroupLink’s ContactWise with Novell GroupWise, Hanefey and King have leveraged their existing Novell investment and capitalized on an excellent operation system. “The staff response has been excellent,” said Mr. Tuttle. “The ability to operate our contact management needs with clarity and certainty has been a tremendous success for us.”