Who's buying what

City giant Herbert Smith kicks off our latest round-up of product purchases.

It has bought the Enterprise Vault e-mail management system from KVS to reduce e-mail overload with Microsoft Exchange, and provide lawyers with a tool to search and retrieve all documents relating to client matters.

It is being initially implemented in London and then installed across Herbert Smith's global network during a phased roll-out this year.

John Rogers, the firm's head of IT, said: 'The need to exchange information between different departments or practices has become business-critical and the number one requirement for our lawyers.

Much of the information is contained within e-mail.

'We identified the need for an e-mail solution that would provide us with a repository for storing archived e-mails, thus clearing our Exchange in-boxes and reducing storage requirements.

One of the main objectives was to identify a product which could provide our lawyers with the ability to store e-mails by matter.'

Leading trade union firm Thompsons has selected Axxia's Case Manager solution for its employment rights unit.

It will be rolled out on a stand-alone basis, with discrete installations going into ten regional offices.

Fee-earners will also be equipped with Axxia Desktop and the Eureka Reporting module.

Stephen Cavalier, head of the unit, said the time-sensitive nature of employment matters meant they had looked for a case management system specifically dedicated to the needs of the work.

A major tendering exercise for a digital dictation pilot at City firm Reynolds Porter Chamberlain has seen nFlow's DictaFlow product win out.

The firm analysed every aspect of the solutions it short-listed, from the scalability and security to the resilience, user friendliness and overall cost of ownership.

After an initial testing period, Reynolds plans to roll it out across the practice.

Two wins for Videss's Expert range of case management solutions: recently formed Preston firm Anderson Eden, which deals exclusively with personal injury work, is rolling out Expert PI.

It has initially bought ten user licences.

Sheffield-based business recovery and insolvency firm Poppleton & Appleby has bought Expert Debt Recovery, only the second purchaser of the product after south Yorkshire firm Credit Collections UK.

The opening of a second office by three-partner south London firm Hartnells - which recently acted for the two brothers acquitted of murdering Damilola Taylor - has led the practice to establish a single communications link between the two sites, which are less than a mile apart.

The link carries both data and voice traffic, making use of the latest routing technology and a VoIP (Voice over IP) telephony system that allows both sites to share a single switchboard.

This means it only incurs a single charge for the combined data and voice link.

Professional Technology installed Cisco 1751 routers to connect the sites over a dedicated Kilostream-N link with ISDN dial-up connections for route back-up and bandwidth on demand, as well as high-speed Internet connections.

Opus Business Systems installed an Inter-Tel Axxess telephone system.