Herbert Smith Freehills

professional services businesses, bringing together the best people across its 26 offices, to meet the legal services needs of its clients globally.

With it's London office at Exchange House, a landmark building overlooking Liverpool Street station in the City of London, this consistently highly-ranked international law firm is perfectly positioned to service its international clients.

It recently was confirmed as the firm with the most stock market clients in the UK.It recently carried out a refurbishment of some existing space to create a number of high quality client meeting rooms to cater for its evolving and expanding business requirements.

One of the key aspects of the refurbishment was the creation of a 'Deal Suite', a collection of high-profile meeting rooms, designed to provide private space for it to close deals.

As a trusted partner to HSF for over 10 years, Kinly was appointed directly to the client to design and deliver a world-class, integrated audio visual solution for its newly refurbished office space.

The Solution

Client service, performance, innovation are at the heart of HSF's strategy and for that reason the firm is embracing the latest technologies to achieve the best results for its clients. From the outset, HSF had a clear vision about what it wanted to achieve with the space, in particularly the Deal Suite, which consisted of a 32-people Boardroom and two additional meeting spaces that can each hold up to 12 people.

Having worked extensively with HSF in the past, Kinly had developed a very good and deep understanding of the way it operates and we were invited to be part of the project's design steering committee from the very start, working hand-in-hand with the firm's in-house AV and IT teams as well as the architects, designers and building contractors involved in the office design and fit-out. This highly iterative and collaborative process ensured that the final solution would be of the highest quality and fit seamlessly into the stylish and modern new meeting room environment.

The most technically challenging part of the project was the Boardroom, which at almost 15m in length, presented a number of difficulties. As there was no single LCD screen large enough to cater to this space (due to the maximum viewing distance of the furthest participant), we proposed a video wall display solution. The video wall is made up of nine NEC ultra-narrow bezel LCD displays in a 3x3 layout giving a total image size of 138”, which provides an incredible visual experience for meetings.

Each of the meeting rooms is equipped with Cisco videoconferencing facilities, NEC large format displays and Harman/AMX touch panels and control systems. Barco ClickShare wireless presentation systems have also been deployed in every room to allow meeting participants to connect and present content from their laptops or mobile devices.

To provide greater flexibility and multi-functionality, two of the spaces are divisible meeting rooms. These feature NEC projection systems including ceiling mounted projectors and motorised projection screens. Flexible audio programming and 'presets' have also been deployed to cater for the different ways the room can be set or configured.

In keeping with the firm’s collaborative and technology-forward mindset, HSF also deployed six Microsoft Surface Hubs - an interactive team collaboration device - which works natively with the firm's Skype for Business communication platform and allows for collaborative team sessions with audio, video and web conferencing capabilities.

The Surface Hubs are predominately used to bring together in-room and remote counsel, and clients to share information, brainstorm ideas and build successful relationships.

Kinly continues to work with HSF as part of an ongoing maintenance agreement to ensure the new systems continue to work at their optimal performance and that the technology is utilised as best it can. This has also included providing technical training to the in-house AV team on the new videoconferencing equipment so that they are able to assist employees locally.