Success Story: Bennett, Bigelow & Leedom

Founded in 1983, Bennett Bigelow & Leedom represents a full spectrum of healthcare clients, including physicians, hospitals,and academic medical centers in Washington, as well as in other states. It provides a wide range of legal services, including litigation and general business services. In addition to healthcare clients, it represents individuals and organizations outside the healthcare industry, counseling them in transactions, litigation, and other matters.

Challenge
Face-to-face interaction enables lawyers to connect, build rapport, and establish trust with their clients. But when this vital client relationship strategy became impractical due to the COVID-19 pandemic, law firms like Bennett Bigelow & Leedom were required to re-think their approach. Due to the nature of its work, especially in litigation representation with frontline healthcare providers such as doctors, hospitals,and clinics, Bennett Bigelow & Leedom knew that in order to ensure the health and safety of its clients and its lawyers and support staff, they could no longer rely on this method. As a
result, they began to search for an alternative that would still allow for intimate client interaction while avoiding the extra risk of meeting in-person.
Another challenge arose when the State of Washington enacted the “Stay Home – Stay Safe” order. The firm then needed to navigate the intricacies of remote work.

This placed a heavy burden on Heather Munday, Director of Practice Support, and her team, who are responsible for ensuring all firm employees can access the network, share, collaborate, connect, and complete the work they need to do. But given the varying comfort levels of the firm’s attorneys with technology and new processes, achieving their goals was going to be easier said than done.

Solution
Fortunately, Bennett Bigelow & Leedom already had LogMeIn’s GoToMeeting and were able to easily add additional licenses to cover their entire team of attorneys. Now, their attorneys can conduct hearings, connect with expert witnesses, and even hold depositions, regardless of the location of participants. By using the screenshare feature, attorneys and clients can look
at the same computer screen and follow along in real time.This has already helped increase the team’s productivity and efficiency, which is a significant win for the firm.

“GoToMeeting’s screenshare cuts out so much misunderstanding. It cuts out 9,000 e-mails about paragraph 12. Attorneys can say, ‘Let’s just look at paragraph 12 together and fix it.’ Then they’re done in five minutes,” shared Munday. While Bennett Bigelow & Leedom has enjoyed GoToMeeting’s reliability and ease of use, perhaps the most critical feature has been its HIPAA compliance.

“Because we deal with healthcare providers, HIPAA is a huge issue for us. So, being able to tell both our lawyers and our clients:
GoToMeeting is secure, you’re safe, you can password protect it, you can lock the meeting. We researched this, we feel confident, we trust LogMeIn, we’ve used them before. Those things have been really important,” explained Munday.

While Bennett Bigelow & Leedom also utilized LogMeIn’s Central prior to the pandemic, the solution has been invaluable in the transition to full remote work. It has enabled Munday to remotely set up the entire firm to work from home, address ad-hoc technology emergencies, and conduct on the fly trainings easily and securely. When the firm decided to roll out new laptops to their attorneys at the same time, they didn’t have to worry because they knew Central could support this effort as well. “We would be dead in the water without a reliable, easy way to login to people’s machines. We went from having only the lawyers set up to the whole firm being able to work remotely within a week. It’s been a huge help to have that as a reliable resource and to know that we can connect to anybody has made a huge difference. We love Central,” said Munday.

The final piece of the puzzle was LogMeIn’s GoToRoom solution.Bennett Bigelow & Leedom set up GoToRoom a few weeks prior to COVID-19 to establish reliable video connectivity between its two offices. However, since the pandemic hit, Munday has been able to offer the solution as an alternative to the lawyers who felt uncomfortable using video conferencing in their own home for depositions or court hearings. “Lawyers spend a lot of time thinking about how they look for the jury, and I think it just sticks. So, being able to give them the assurance that they can come in, have that conference room confidence, and you won’t have to worry about making anything work. You’re going to sound and look great. GoToRoom has really helped with that,” stated Munday. Attorneys have enjoyed GoToRoom’s ability to track the active speaker, whether they’re stationary or moving around the room, as well as its whiteboarding feature. These capabilities have allowed for diverse interaction preferences and provide an extra layer of comfort for both internal and external meetings.

Results
Munday has received overwhelmingly positive feedback from internal staff and clients alike. They have seen promising indicators of success, including reduced misunderstandings, improved connections, and time efficiency. When asked to summarize her overall experience with GoToMeeting, Central, and GoToRoom, Munday said, “The intuitiveness has made all the difference in having to learn a ton of different products to make a bunch of different things happen.”