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DALLAS (Feb. 1, 2023) — Immigration powerhouse BAL kicks off another year of distinction with the National Law Journal’s 2023 Legal Technology Trailblazers Award. The award recognizes “agents of change that are using innovation to help ease the daily tasks taken on by law firms and legal departments.”
“We’re honored by this recognition that embodies our commitment to cutting-edge technological tools that address the needs and challenges of in-house corporate immigration professionals,” said Managing Partner Jeremy Fudge. “I continue to be inspired by our incredible people behind all of our award-winning technology. They truly are the agents of change who make a positive difference in people’s lives every day.”
BAL’s proprietary immigration platform, Cobalt®, leads the industry with its innovative use of AI, robotic process automation (RPA), machine learning and other emerging technologies that enhance the immigration programs for companies and their in-house teams and make the immigration journey smoother for millions of users around the world.
As a result of BAL’s innovations, our teams spend less time on rote tasks and can focus their talents on what they do best: connecting with clients, building relationships, providing bespoke legal strategies and delivering an exceptional client experience. BAL’s investment in time-saving technology provides work-life balance to our teams, and the firm’s people-centered culture continues to attract the best talent in the industry.
“Our innovative spirit is what sets BAL apart, along with our unique ability to blend our tech teams with our legal teams to create practical tools that solve specific problems,” said Chief Technology Officer Chanille Juneau. “We are excited about new projects already in the works for 2023.”
This NLJ Legal Technology Trailblazers Award comes on the heels of BAL sweeping more than two dozen top honors for law, technology, DE&I and workplace culture in 2022.
About BAL BAL, the world’s leading corporate immigration law firm, is singularly focused on meeting the immigration challenges of corporate clients around the world in ways that make immigration more strategic and enable businesses to be more successful. Established in 1980, BAL has consistently provided immigration expertise, people-centered client services and leading technology innovation. In 2018, BAL entered into a first-of-its-kind strategic alliance with Deloitte U.K. to create the world’s first global immigration service delivery model.
BAL’s proprietary Cobalt® digital immigration services platform won the 2020 CODiE Award for Best Legal Tech Product, the prestigious CIO100 award for Innovative Use of Intelligent Automation in Immigration Services and Legalweek’s Most Innovative Law Firm Operations Team of 2021. BAL and its leaders are highly ranked in every major legal publication, including Best Lawyers, Chambers and Partners, The Legal 500 and Who’s Who Legal. BAL has ranked #1 on multiple industry rankings for diversity, equity and inclusion, including the #1 Law Firm for Women by the National Law Journal four years in a row (2019-2022), #1 on the Diversity Scorecard by The American Lawyer (2020 and 2021), and #1 on Law360’s Diversity Snapshot for three years running (2020-2022). BAL won seven of Comparably’s Best Company categories in 2022, including for Career Growth, Perks & Benefits, Women and Diversity. The Dallas Business Journal named BAL one of only a handful of the 2022 Best Places to Work based exclusively on employee feedback. U.S. News & World Report–Best Lawyers named BAL the 2023 Immigration Law Firm of the Year.
Media Contact: Emily Albrecht Senior Director — Marketing & Communications ealbrecht@bal.com 469-559-0174
DALLAS, July 14, 2021 – Tech-forward immigration law firm Berry Appleman & Leiden (BAL) won the Most Innovative Law Firm Operations Team of the Year Award, announced by Legalweek at the Leaders in Tech Law Awards ceremony Tuesday. The award recognizes BAL’s proprietary case management system, Cobalt®, for its speed and efficiency in serving clients worldwide.
Legalweek honored firms that developed innovative tech solutions during a year of “unprecedented uncertainty and needed flexibility.” With vision and foresight, BAL’s Operations began enhancements on Cobalt in mid-2019 and finished the project shortly after COVID lockdowns began. Cobalt’s lightning-fast search engine and document upload features surpassed all expectations in timing and effectiveness.
“I’m honored to work and innovate with an incredible team in a unique environment,” said Chanille Juneau, Head of Products. “At BAL we have forward-thinking tech people who work side-by-side with our legal teams, figuring out how to apply technology to the legal practice in ways that are most effective and beneficial to clients.”
The team optimized Cobalt to handle the growing number of users as BAL expanded its caseload. Juneau and her team improved search accuracy and enabled greater speed and document upload capability, so that users would have the same experience regardless of whether one person or 1,000 people were simultaneously searching or uploading a document.
The new system launched August 2020, six weeks before the government unexpectedly opened a filing window that led to the biggest wave of immigrant green-card filings in 15 years. With enhancements to Cobalt’s performance and scalability, BAL was able to successfully file more than 10,000 cases for clients in a four-week filing period, with Cobalt handling a record number of users, searches and document uploads, while experiencing zero down time or outages.
“This project was a significant win for our firm and our clients. Cobalt is already an industry-leading legal tech product, and our teams elevated its performance level and utility during a critical time,” said Chief Information & Technology Officer Vince DiMascio.
“During the massive surge in usage, Cobalt operated without a single misstep, and we filed all client applications without interruption,” added Partner Edward Rios, Head of Innovation. “Even during stressful caseload surges, our clients can sleep at night knowing that nothing will be dropped because we have the best people and tools in the industry.”
Rios and DiMascio also presented at Legalweek’s Driving Legal Forward virtual event on Tuesday, leading a speaker session on “Change Management, Successful Law Firm Transformation and How to Implement AI, RPA and Emerging Technologies Into Your Law Firm.”
In addition to representing BAL’s leadership in innovative legal operations, this award demonstrates the positive impact BAL is making in people’s lives. BAL’s sophisticated legal teams backed by groundbreaking tech enable the firm to help countless people through their immigrant journeys to pursue their American dreams.
DALLAS (May 28, 2021) – Immigration law firm Berry Appleman & Leiden LLP (BAL) is a finalist in three categories of the International Legal Innovation Awards by UK Law.com, announced today in London at a virtual awards ceremony. The firm was shortlisted for its technological innovation in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Knowledge Management and Marketing.
“We are proud of the curiosity and spirit that drive everything we do,” said Edward Rios, a BAL Partner and Head of Innovation & Strategy. “Being a finalist for three awards across very different departments is a testament to our forward-thinking culture.”
In the AI category, BAL is an award finalist for its Client Transition AI that helps accelerate and drive quality in data collection and migration as new clients bring their casework to BAL. The onboarding process combines immigration and industry knowledge with advanced technology to bring large data sets into the firm’s systems in a reliable format.
“Our technology platforms work hand in hand with our staff to provide real-time intelligence while our legal teams and support staff handle the most critical tasks for our clients,” said Vince DiMascio, CIO. “We use technology to increase speed, enhance quality, and ultimately give our people ‘superpowers’ through design, automation and practical AI.”
In the Knowledge Management category, BAL was recognized for combining its technological tools and immigration expertise to provide clients with the industry’s first multi-media immigration knowledge portal to house immigration breaking news analysis, FAQs, Immigration 101 basics, process maps, how-to videos, and much more. Dubbed “Advisor,” the portal provides corporate clients and their foreign-national employees access to up-to-date immigration information and knowledge on-demand, available 24/7, on their computers or mobile devices.
“BAL’s Advisor provides exemplary knowledge management for clients’ HR professionals and their employees,” said Katie Stone, Knowledge Management Director. “We also created Advisor+, which is a higher tier of content curated specifically for our clients’ HR mobility professionals to give them unique insights into the industry and their roles and obligations under immigration laws, regulations and best practices standards.”
BAL is also an award finalist for its Marketing Department’s innovative approach to providing original, timely immigration news.
“BAL’s goal was to create content marketing that is so valuable that it is not perceived as marketing, but as an indispensable service,” said Hennessey Knoop, Chief Marketing Officer. “BAL not only publishes the most immigration stories, we also supply the most up-to-date coverage and thoughtful, easy-to-understand analysis.”
In the past year, BAL met the unique challenge of covering COVID-19’s impact on travel and immigration, as countries around the world canceled flights, closed borders and suspended visa issuance. Most immigration firms created stand-alone COVID-19 resources, but did not publish COVID-19 news on a daily basis. BAL did both. BAL worked with its alliance partner, Deloitte UK, to create a cutting-edge COVID-19 information resource—a comprehensive Digital Map showing the most current status of travel, quarantine and work-permit rules for nearly every country in the world. In 2020, BAL published 980 news alerts, including 242 U.S. alerts,.
About Berry Appleman & Leiden LLP (BAL)
BAL, one of the world’s most recognized corporate immigration law firms, is the Best Lawyers® “Law Firm of the Year” in U.S. Immigration Law for 2019, the Most Diverse Law Firm in America (2021 and 2020) and the Best Law Firm for Women (2019 and 2020). BAL’s Cobalt® digital immigration services platform won the 2020 CODiE Award for Best Legal Tech Product and the prestigious CIO100 award for Innovative Use of Intelligent Automation in Immigration Services. BAL is singularly focused on meeting the immigration challenges of corporate clients around the world in ways that make immigration more strategic and enable clients to be more successful. Established in 1980, BAL has consistently provided immigration expertise, top-notch information security and leading technology innovation. The firm entered into a strategic alliance with Deloitte UK to create the world’s first global immigration service delivery model. BAL and its leaders are highly ranked in every major legal publication, including Best Lawyers, Chambers and Partners, The Legal 500, and Who’s Who Legal. See website for details: https://www.bal.com/.
DALLAS – Oct. 26, 2020 – Berry Appleman and Leiden LLP (BAL), one of the world’s leading corporate immigration law firms, is a Tech Titans Award finalist.
Representing the best products, technologies, and services in software, information and business technology in North Texas, Tech Titans recognizes BAL for its proprietary Cobalt® platform as a unique and breakthrough technology in corporate innovation. BAL competed against more than 160 award nominees.
“It is an honor to be recognized as a 2020 TechTitans Award finalist,” said BAL’s Head of Products, Chanille Juneau. “BAL is proud of our technological achievements and our commitment to innovate and create new tools to continually improve our clients’ experience. This recognition is a credit to the relationships we have built with our clients and the hard work our people do every single day.”
BAL’s Cobalt® digital immigration services platform has earned numerous accolades in the legal and tech spaces, including the 2020 CIO 100 Award and the 2020 CODiE Award for Best Legal Tech Product. Cobalt is BAL’s proprietary, second-to-none immigration case management system, providing real-time visibility into clients’ immigration programs in a single platform that enables centralized program management to power companies’ business initiatives. Cobalt offers features such as the industry’s first mobile app, allowing employees to monitor their cases anywhere, anytime. With advanced application of computer vision, employees can upload documents, check case status, view milestones, and send secure messages from their phones. A leader in legal technology, BAL is ahead of its peers in enhancing the client experience through intelligent automation and computer vision technologies.
“BAL is developing truly groundbreaking technology that is transforming and challenging the traditional legal services delivery model,” explains BAL’s CIO, Vince DiMascio. “BAL is taking the leading role in pushing the boundaries of innovation while never losing sight of our mission to make a positive difference in people’s lives.”
About Berry Appleman & Leiden LLP
BAL is one of the world’s most recognized corporate immigration law firms and the Best Lawyers® “Law Firm of the Year” in U.S. Immigration Law (2019), the Most Diverse Law Firm in America (2020) and the Best Law Firm for Women by the National Law Journal (2019 and 2020) and the #1 Law Firm for Female Attorneys in its category by Law360 (2019 and 2020). BAL’s Cobalt® digital immigration services platform earned a 2020 CIO 100 Award and won the 2020 CODiE Award for Best Legal Tech Product.The firm is singularly focused on meeting the immigration challenges of corporate clients around the world in ways that make immigration more strategic and enable clients to be more successful. Established in 1980, the firm provides immigration expertise, top-notch information security and leading technology innovation. The firm entered into a strategic alliance with Deloitte UK to create the world’s first global immigration service delivery model. BAL and its leaders are highly ranked in every major legal publication, including Best Lawyers, Chambers, The Legal 500, and Who’s Who Legal. For more information, please visit: www.bal.com.
About Tech Titans
Tech Titans is the largest technology trade association in Texas, representing a quarter million employees through its 300 member companies. Tech Titans includes a diverse group of technology leaders from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies who collaborate to help innovation thrive in the region. As part of its goals, Tech Titans is active in:
For information, please visit www.techtitans.org.
Leading immigration law firm enhances client experience with Cobalt® UiPath Connectors and new types of RPA
DALLAS – In another first in the legal tech space, Berry Appleman & Leiden LLP (BAL) in partnership with Accelirate delivers first-of-its-kind UiPath connectors, empowering clients to leverage cost-effective automation to perform immigration requests and actions within BAL’s proprietary Cobalt case management software.
“We are very excited to be first to market with our Cobalt connector,” explains Ashley Fleischer, BAL’s Automation Services Manager. “Our clients are able to automate rote tasks in Cobalt, enhance quality, and ultimately work more efficiently.”
BAL collaborated with UiPath and Accelirate, the foremost enterprise robotic process automation (RPA) platform, to create the connectors and scale BAL’s legal services to meet increased client case volumes and turnaround needs. Accelirate, a member of the UiPath Services Network and a Diamond Partner, plays a key role in the firm’s automation initiatives, collaborating with BAL to identify high-volume, time-intensive internal processes to automate. The release of the BAL Cobalt UiPath Connector marks another milestone in the law firm’s use of technology. “This is an industry first for immigration. We love pushing the envelope by building solutions that add value through customer experience, productivity, quality, and speed. BAL leads its industry in technology innovation, and we are proud to partner with them,” said Ahmed Zaidi, Accelirate’s Chief Automation Officer.
“BAL is just the type of innovative organization we are eager to support, and we’re thrilled they’ve adopted our technology to further that innovation with Accelirate,” said Frank Czyz, Vice President, Americas Partners at UiPath. “Our HyperAutomation platform is meant to help companies focus on what they do best—bringing supreme products to market and delighting customers—and BAL is already doing that. As the company continues to digitize its business, we expect their results with our solution will only get better.”
Since 2018, BAL’s Automation & AI Development Center has focused on automating numerous repetitive manual tasks, including finance, reporting, and immigration processes—all with tremendous success. BAL employees are happy to leave the repetitive tasks to the robots and embrace technology as a means to an end: focusing on the human aspects of immigration and making a positive difference in people’s lives. By selectively leveraging automation, BAL’s people are able to focus on giving our clients unparalleled service, strategic analysis, and expert legal advice. Thanks to the connectors, BAL’s clients can adopt these same benefits within their own organizations and for their own internal mobility teams.
“These connectors help our clients—CDOs, CIOs, and Data teams—increase quality, velocity and efficiency in their immigration programs,” said Vince DiMascio, BAL’s CIO. “It is one more way that BAL is adding value to our legal services, enabling clients to hire and retain the best talent in the world, and powering human achievement.”
The BAL Cobalt Connector is currently available on UiPath Connect.
About Berry Appleman & Leiden LLP BAL, one of the world’s most recognized corporate immigration law firms, is the Best Lawyers® “Law Firm of the Year” in U.S. Immigration Law for 2019, the Most Diverse Law Firm in America (2020) and the Best Law Firm for Women (2019 and 2020). BAL’s Cobalt® digital immigration services platform earned a 2020 CIO 100 Award and won the 2020 CODiE Award for Best Legal Tech Product. The firm is singularly focused on meeting the immigration challenges of corporate clients around the world in ways that make immigration more strategic and enable clients to be more successful. Established in 1980, the firm provides immigration expertise, top-notch information security and leading technology innovation. The firm entered into a strategic alliance with Deloitte UK to create the world’s first global immigration service delivery model. BAL and its leaders are highly ranked in every major legal publication, including Best Lawyers, Chambers, The Legal 500, and Who’s Who Legal. See website for details: https://www.bal.com/.
About Accelirate Accelirate Inc. is the largest niche RPA Services provider in the United States and a certified Diamond Delivery Partner of UiPath. Their mission is to help companies accelerate automation using Robotic Process Automation and AI Technologies such as Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Smart OCR. With a focus solely on process automation, they offer a comprehensive set of Implementation Services and Custom Automation Products for Enterprises at all stages of RPA and AI adoption. Accelirate has experience in Enterprise Automation for a variety of industries from Financial and Legal, to Consumer Manufacturing and Retail. With innovations such as their award-winning RPA90X, a 90-Day Automation Accelerator Program, and the first-ever Managed Robotic Operations Center (ROC), to monitor and support deployed automations 24/7, Accelirate is changing the face of Digital Transformation.
DALLAS, May 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Berry Appleman & Leiden LLP (BAL), the leader in immigration law, won the annual SIIA CODiE Award for Best Legal Solution of 2020. The prestigious CODiE Awards recognize companies producing the most innovative businesses technology products across industries, and around the world. BAL won the award for Cobalt®, its industry-leading digital immigration platform.
Cobalt® allows companies to manage and track their immigration cases for their employees across the globe within a single integrated system that provides seamless case tracking, insight, analytics, reporting, status updates and more.
“Cobalt® continues to deliver on its promise and earn accolades from the market and prestigious technology industry publications. BAL is the first immigration law firm to win this award, making it even more notable. While other companies and firms have tried and failed to create similar systems, we successfully built Cobalt® ourselves. The result is one of the industry’s most advanced platforms, customized to meet the needs of our clients and their employees now and in the future,” said BAL’s Managing Partner, Jeremy Fudge.
“It is a huge honor to be recognized by our peers,” said Chanille Juneau, the firm’s Head of Products. “We continue to strive to create products that not only support our legal teams but give our clients the best experience possible. The best software is created when innovative technologists collaborate with subject matter experts. BAL is fortunate enough to have both in-house, allowing our Products team to work alongside immigration law experts on a daily basis to build industry-leading software.”
SIIA President Jeff Joseph congratulated the winners: “The products and services we honor today connect us to colleagues and customers, ensure business practices move forward, provide new insights from data, and create new jobs and market opportunities. They represent the best of high-impact, outcome-focused innovation.”
The CODiE Awards are the industry’s only peer-reviewed awards program. Entries are reviewed and scored by software and business technology experts before members of the Software & Information Industry Association members vote for the finalists. Scores from both rounds are tabulated to select the winners.
About the SIIA CODiE Awards The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) is the principal trade association for the software and digital content industries. Forty-three awards were given this year for products and services deployed specifically for B2B software, information and media companies, including the Best Overall Business Technology Product, awarded to the product with the highest scores of both rounds of judging. More information about the Awards is available at: siia.net/CODiE.
Details about the winning products can be found at https://www.siia.net/codie/2020-Winners
Significant investment in AI and automation maintains BAL’s position as the technology and innovation leader in immigration law
Dallas, April 7, 2020 – Berry Appleman & Leiden LLP (BAL), the leading immigration law firm in the world, will be honored at this year’s CIO 100 Symposium for its work bringing innovative AI and automation technology to the legal industry.
The award recognizes 100 organizations for their achievements in technology innovation. Winners’ initiatives are evaluated by a team of external judges on their use of leading-edge IT practices that produce measurable results. The award is an acknowledged mark of enterprise excellence. CIO recognized BAL for its innovative Intelligent Automation program portfolio, which combines artificial intelligence (AI) — including natural language processing, machine learning, and decision networks — with robotic process automation (RPA) to enhance quality, speed, and client experience.
“This extraordinary honor comes as a result of years of targeted investment in developing next generation technologies,” said Vince DiMascio, BAL’s CIO. “Our firm demands the best tools for our people and our clients, and I’m very proud to say that, thanks to our groundbreaking work in this area, the technical promise of automation is now being realized in a practical way.”
“Our goal is to enable BAL legal teams to focus on the client experience. Automation of certain repetitive administrative and clerical manual tasks allows them to do just that,” explains Edward Rios, BAL Partner and Innovation Leader. “By leveraging RPA to accomplish these processes, both internal and client-facing teams are able to dedicate themselves to higher-value and more client-focused interactions, strengthening the underlying service relationship while also improving operational efficiency. We’re delighted to be celebrated by CIO 100 as an organization that understands how to use the latest technology in innovative ways.”
BAL partnered with UIPath, Accelirate, and Synaptiq to enhance business processes using intelligent automation with the goal of driving productivity, eliminating errors, and allowing legal teams to focus less on mundane tasks and more on their clients.
“The possibilities are endless when it comes to automation; but not all automation is created equal,” says Ashley Fleischer, BAL Automation Project Manager. “That’s why we’ve partnered with the best minds in AI and automation to develop the most effective solutions in the immigration field.”
BAL will be recognized at the CIO 100 Symposium & Awards Ceremony on Aug. 19 at the Terranea Resort in Rancho Palos Verdes, CA.
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Cobalt® Earns Prestigious Industry Recognition
Dallas, March 31, 2020 – BAL, one of the world’s leading corporate immigration law firms and a legal tech groundbreaker, today announced that Cobalt® was named a 2020 SIIA CODiE™ Award finalist in the Best Legal Solution category. Finalists represent the best products, technologies, and services in software, information and business technology.
Cobalt is BAL’s proprietary, and second to none, immigration case management system, providing real-time visibility into clients’ immigration programs. Cobalt is a single platform that enables centralized program management to power companies’ business initiatives. With Cobalt, BAL offers features such as the industry’s first mobile app, allowing employees to monitor their cases anywhere, anytime. With advanced application of Optical Character Recognition (OCR), employees can upload documents, check case status, view milestones, and send secure messages from their phones. As a leader in legal technology, BAL and Cobalt are ahead of the curve in enhancing client experience through Robotic Process Automation (RPA), OCR and Computer Vision (CV) technologies.
Acknowledged as the premier awards program for the software and information industries for 35 years, the SIIA CODiE Awards are produced by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), the principal trade association for the software, education, media and digital content industries. Cobalt was honored as one of 150 finalists across the 40 business technology categories.
BAL CIO Vince DiMascio stated, “It is our honor to be recognized as a 2020 CODiE Award finalist. BAL is proud to have the opportunity to represent great clients and support their efforts around the world through an exceptional group of people in both our Legal and Products teams. Working together we can take on bigger and more meaningful challenges as we push ourselves to innovate and accomplish amazing things. This award is a credit to the relationships we keep and the hard work our people do every single day.”
The SIIA CODiE Awards are the industry’s only peer-recognized awards program. Business technology leaders including senior executives, analysts, media, consultants and investors evaluate assigned products during the first-round review. Their scores determine the SIIA CODiE Award finalists which account for 80% of the overall score. SIIA members then vote on the finalist products and the scores from both rounds are tabulated to select the winners. Business Technology category winners will be announced May 18 during an online winner announcement ceremony.
Expansion into Santa Clara offers tech clients on-the-ground support in Silicon Valley
DALLAS, Oct. 17, 2019 – Berry Appleman & Leiden (BAL) LLP, one of the world’s largest immigration law firms, is expanding its presence in the U.S. through the addition of a new office in Santa Clara, the heart of Silicon Valley. BAL is already the fastest growing immigration firm, and this move allows the firm to meet current client needs and further expand its market position as the go-to firm for the tech industry.
Immigration has become increasingly complex and unpredictable at a time of fierce competition for global talent, especially in technology and other cutting-edge industries. It is no longer optional for businesses to have a reliable and effective immigration provider—it is a must. BAL provides on-the-ground capabilities and high-touch services to walk clients through their immigration and mobility challenges.
Last year, BAL enjoyed a breakout year. A first-of-its-kind alliance with Deloitte UK expanded our global capabilities, followed by the opening of a new office in New York City that further broadened our presence in the U.S. and diversified our clientele to financial services and other industries. The year culminated in BAL being named “Immigration Law Firm of the Year” for 2019 by U.S. News & World Report and Best Lawyers.
“We are on an aggressive growth trajectory and this addition puts us in the driver’s seat to transform immigration in the tech world,” said Jeremy Fudge, BAL Managing Partner. “BAL was born nearly four decades ago in San Francisco. Our expansion into Silicon Valley reflects our roots in combining superior expertise with an entrepreneurial spirit, and our commitment to growing with our clients as they face new challenges and embrace new possibilities.”
BAL Partners Carla Tarazi and Frieda Garcia will lead the opening of the new office. Both partners have deep knowledge of Silicon Valley companies and extensive experience managing some of the largest immigration programs in the tech industry, providing preeminent client services with care and compassion.
“This is an exciting opportunity to be at the epicenter of innovation and at the intersection of immigration and technology—two fields that are rapidly changing and reinventing the world,” said Tarazi.
“While BAL has served tech companies for decades, our physical presence in Silicon Valley will enable us to strengthen existing relationships and forge new connections,” said Garcia.
About BAL BAL is singularly focused on meeting the immigration challenges of corporate clients around the world in ways that make immigration more strategic and clients more successful. Established in 1980, the firm provides unmatched immigration expertise, top-notch information security and leading technology innovation such as its Cobalt® digital immigration services platform. In 2018, the firm formed a strategic alliance with Deloitte UK to create the world’s first global immigration service delivery model. BAL and its leaders are highly ranked in every major legal publication, including Best Lawyers, Chambers, The Legal 500, and Who’s Who Legal. See website for details: www.bal.com.
Leading immigration law firm leverages automation to enhance client service and business performance
DALLAS; NEW YORK; SAN FRANCISCO – Berry Appleman & Leiden LLP (BAL), the leading immigration law firm in the world, recently announced it has selected UiPath, the leading enterprise Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform, to continue its intelligent automation journey. Last year, BAL established its Automation & AI Development Center, which accelerates automation within the business processes that underlie immigration and global mobility. As the firm continues to evolve its use of automation, BAL will apply UiPath’s RPA solution across departments to maximize overall business performance. This will allow BAL to leverage technology to perform certain repetitive manual tasks and allow BAL personnel more time to invest into the customer experience.
As part of its strategic 2020 plan, the firm set out to identify a vendor that could partner with them and enhance their automation applications. After a rigorous research and evaluation process, BAL selected UiPath as their RPA vendor, namely for the company’s unique capabilities in the area of human-bot interaction – a criterion that BAL was particularly focused on to ensure easy onboarding and management of the solution amongst its employee base.
The firm also collaborates with UiPath partner Accelirate, which plays a critical role in the procurement and training process, offering BAL guidance from experienced RPA practitioners. With the help of Accelirate, BAL identified several internal processes to automate with RPA, such as new employee onboarding, managing client requests and streamlining time-intensive administrative and clerical tasks. The firm is also deploying UiPath in conjunction with its Cobalt® global immigration management platform, which includes the industry’s first mobile immigration app and enhances operational excellence and security throughout the global mobility process. By leveraging RPA to help manage these processes, BAL seeks to alleviate the burden of repetitive tasks so both internal and client-facing teams are able to focus on higher value and more customer-focused interactions. This strengthens the underlying service relationship while also improving operational efficiency.
“With UiPath, we are delivering cognitive capabilities that go well beyond basic RPA areas, such as swivel chair web automation, document processing and form assembly. By adding UiPath to our data, machine learning models and supercomputing power in our Cobalt digital platform, we are in a unique position to continue delivering client service like no other firm,” said Vince DiMascio, CIO of BAL. “Partnering with UiPath’s advanced capabilities maintains BAL’s position as the technology and innovation leader and marks another first in the industry.”
“Delivering exceptional service and insight to our clients means investing in innovation and equipping our legal and operations teams with digital tools and the skills to use them. With UiPath, we increase velocity while creating capacity across our firm, enabling our people to focus on quality, strategy, and expert advice for our clients,” said Edward Rios, a partner at BAL and the firm’s Innovation Leader. “BAL is just the type of innovative organization we are eager to support, and we’re thrilled they’ve adopted our technology to further that innovation,” said Coenraad van der Poel, Head of the Americas at UiPath. “Our platform is meant to help companies focus on what they do best – bringing supreme products to market and delighting customers – and BAL is already doing just that. As the company continues to digitize its business, we expect their results with our solution will only get better.”
About UiPath UiPath is leading the “Automation First” era – championing one robot for every person, delivering free and open training and collaboration and enabling robots to learn new skills through AI and machine learning. Led by a commitment to bring digital era skills to more than a million people, the company’s enterprise Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform has already automated millions of repetitive, mind-numbing tasks for business and government organizations all over the world, improving productivity, customer experience and employee job satisfaction. Recently named by Comparably as the 6th happiest place to work and the 11th best company culture among large businesses, UiPath has become one of the fastest growing enterprise software companies in history. The company is backed by over $400 million in funding from Accel, CapitalG, Credo Ventures, Earlybird’s Digital East Fund, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Madrona, Meritech, Seedcamp and Sequoia.
About Berry Appleman & Leiden LLP BAL is one of the world’s most recognized corporate immigration law firms, and is the Best Lawyers® “Law Firm of the Year” in Immigration Law in America for 2019. The firm is singularly focused on meeting the immigration challenges of corporate clients around the world in ways that make immigration more strategic and enable clients to be more successful. Established in 1980, the firm provides immigration expertise, top-notch information security and leading technology innovation like its Cobalt® digital immigration services platform. The firm entered into a strategic alliance with Deloitte UK to create the world’s first global immigration service delivery model. BAL and its leaders are highly ranked in every major legal publication, including Best Lawyers, Chambers, The Legal 500, and Who’s Who Legal. See website for details: www.bal.com.