Will Meetings of the Future Be Televised?
_______________________________________________________________
By Karen Sloan
The National Law Journal
November 10, 2009
Gregory Gallo has been spending less time at the airport lately.
Instead of hopping on a plane for important meetings, the DLA Piper partner ducks into a high-tech conference room in the firm's East Palo Alto, Calif., office for a face-to-face with colleagues and clients hundreds or thousands of miles away. He can't shake their hands, but he can make eye contact, pick up on facial expressions, read body language and easily gauge the group dynamic -- things that the limitations of traditional videoconferencing systems made difficult to do in the past.
Last spring, DLA Piper became the first law firm to purchase Cisco Systems's TelePresence, one of a growing number of cutting-edge videoconferencing systems designed to replicate the feeling of in-person meetings through state-of-the art cameras, screens, lighting and audio. The technology helps reduce the need for travel, but the relatively high cost means that some industries -- including law firms -- have been slow to buy in.
DLA Piper has installed a TelePresence conference room in six of its U.S. offices and plans to add several overseas. Gallo initially was skeptical about the investment, but now he's a believer.
"You really feel as though you are sitting right across from someone," said Gallo, who has saved himself five or six flights to the East Coast since the system went online in July. "It's so much better than videoconferencing. If there are a lot of people in the conference, you can have a side conversation. The sound and picture quality is so good."
The system's ability to simulate in-person interaction is a little astonishing, but comes at a hefty cost. DLA Piper expects to pay $2.5 million for equipment, room configuration, maintenance and other costs during the next five years, said chief information officer Don Jaycox. The firm also expects to save nearly $1 million annually through reduced travel costs and increased productivity from attorneys who no longer have to give up hours or days to travel, meaning that the system should pay for itself within three years, Jaycox said. Half of DLA Piper's annual global board meetings and U.S. executive committee meetings now transpire via TelePresence. The firm aims to keep some of its U.S. attorneys out of the skies each week with the technology.
"It may be expensive, but it's worth it," Jaycox said.
Enhanced videoconferencing technology has been on the market for at least four years and is offered by a variety of vendors, but law firms have been reluctant to upgrade. Cisco General Counsel Mark Chandler chalks that up to several factors, one being that law firms rarely are early adopters of anything that requires a significant capital expenditure, since that money comes out of partners' pockets. Firms also may be skeptical because earlier versions of videoconferencing technology suffered from problems like audio delays, poor video quality and bad lighting. But Chandler sees the law firm market heating up for the technology.
"I think more and more clients are looking to their lawyers to increase efficiency," he said. "My prediction is that, within the decade, high-definition videoconferencing between lawyers and clients will be the only way to do business."
Fenwick & West Chief Technology Officer Matt Kesner agreed that law firms will embrace the technology; his own firm plans to do so within a year or so. The Mountain View, Calif., firm would already have it were it not for the economic downturn and if it had international offices, he said.
"We're pretty excited about telepresence and we want to utilize it," Kesner said. "We're hoping the prices come down and our budgets go up. I think there are quite a few firms besides us who are on the verge of doing it."
One drawback to telepresence is incompatibility of equipment from different manufacturers, Kesner said.
Although he declined to identify them, several law firms are on the verge of deploying Cisco's TelePresence system, Chandler said.
Nicole Harris, a spokeswoman for Hewlett-Packard Development Co., which manufactures the Halo enhanced videoconferencing system, said that it has yet to find a buyer in the legal sector but "views the legal arena as a viable market."
In addition to DLA Piper, Latham & Watkins and Lathrop & Gage are using the technology. Latham debuted its system in February in five offices -- London, Washington, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. The firm opted for a system made by Tandberg ASA, a Norwegian company that Cisco is in the process of acquiring.
The suites are outfitted with three 65-inch high-definition video screens that face a table where participants from various locations can interact. The firm also bought 50 smaller desktop telepresence systems; these can connect with each other for small-scale meetings and with the suites for larger gatherings. The firm can hold meetings connecting all 27 of its offices.
Latham chief information officer Kenneth Heaps declined to disclose what the firm spent but noted that a single Tandberg suite can cost more than $500,000. The firm received a discounted rate, he said.
'COLLEGIAL ATMOSPHERE'
"For us, the main factor was not to save money on travel but to create a collegial atmosphere," Heaps said. "With telepresence, you don't miss a thing. When you have a poor video conferencing system, it becomes a distraction from the meeting."
Clients often use the suites to confer with Latham attorneys in remote U.S. or overseas offices, Heaps said, and on occasion clients have borrowed the firm's system to do internal business. A recent lateral candidate in Washington interviewed via the system with practice group leaders in London, Paris and Germany, then with executive-level partners in San Francisco, all in a single day and without leaving his hometown. "In the past, lateral candidates have been flown all around to meet with partners, but this is a lot more convenient," Heaps said.
Use of Latham's system has climbed steadily during the nine months that it has been up and running, and the firm already has plans to add more suites, Heaps said.
The system has made it easier for more partners to take part in firm administration at Lathrop & Gage, said Chief Executive Officer Joel Voran. Being active in firm management no longer requires time-consuming trips for in-person planning meetings. Now, all of the firm's monthly executive committee meetings are done via the system, and each of its 13 offices has that capability.
The 280-attorney firm decided to upgrade its videoconferencing technology in 2007 when it reconfigured the conference space in its Kansas City, Mo., headquarters. It purchased several different smaller enhanced systems from Polycom and has six designated rooms for videoconferencing in Kansas City, said Chief Information Officer Ben Weinberger. One room has a 150-inch screen; another has two 50-inch screens and an oval conference table that simulates in-person meetings.
The equipment for each room cost approximately $9,000, although that does not include the costs of reconfiguring the rooms. The firm uses the system 900 hours per year on average, and that figure is on the rise, Weinberger said.
"I think we have a much better ability to communicate. A lot of the things you pick up during a conversation aren't from the words. It's from body language and things like that," Voran said.
Lathrop occasionally hosts curious managing partners and executives from other firms who want to check out its enhanced teleconferencing capabilities. Invariably, they are impressed by what they see, Voran said.
Cisco's legal department has been using the company's TelePresence system since it debuted in 2006 for everything from weekly department meetings to the selection of outside counsel, Chandler said. The system has helped spur more interaction between lower-level department managers, since they typically don't travel as much as do higher-level managers. Chandler often purposely arrives late at these meetings to observe the participants chattering as they would if they were all in the same room. That banter rarely happens during telephone conferences. "It creates a much richer form of collaboration and a true team environment," Chandler said.
If Chandler's predictions about the growth of the technology are right, the future of law firm communication is behind the door of a conference room on the 88th floor of DLA Piper's New York offices.
The room is painted in a muted gold, the same color as the firm's five other identical telepresence rooms in East Palo Alto, San Diego, Washington, Baltimore and Chicago. The uniform room size, color and configuration are key to creating the illusion that users are in the same place. A bank of three 64-inch high-definition video screens are framed by a wall of professional-grade lighting. The room has its own air-conditioning system, since it tends to warm up because of the lights and large video screens. Half of an oval table dead ends into the video screens, where users from other locations appear nearly life-size. Three cameras perched atop the video screens point down at the table. Three microphones mounted in the table pick up the conversation from those sitting down, while two speakers at opposite ends transmit sounds in real time. This setup means that a speaker's voice comes from the area where his or her image appears on screen, which fosters eye connection and the illusion of an in-person exchange.
"When you speak, I turn to you," Jaycox said. "When you say something funny, I turn to you and smile in real time. For all intents and purposes, you look like you're in the same room. Your mind really buys into the illusion." |
