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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
Dallas, April 28, 2020 – Berry Appleman & Leiden LLP (BAL) is pleased to introduce an immigration chatbot to help demystify complex legal definitions and immigration concepts.
The chatbot, who goes by the moniker “Ellie,” represents another first as BAL continues to lead the industry in using innovative technology to enhance the client experience. Ellie takes her name from the historic Ellis Island, a gateway to freedom for generations of American immigrants.
“Ellis Island symbolizes the challenges, dreams and complexity surrounding U.S. immigration, and Ellie represents another step in BAL’s mission as a firm to make a positive difference in people’s lives and to power human achievement,” said Edward Rios, a BAL Partner and Innovation Leader who heads the firm’s Boston office.
Ellie is able to field questions about visa categories and other immigration definitions and give simple and straightforward answers to queries, such as “What is a TN visa?” and “How does premium processing work?”
Using natural language processing, a form of artificial intelligence, Ellie can understand everyday speech, so users do not need to have a background in legal terminology or specific search-engine phrases.
“Ellie is yet another innovation we’ve delivered to provide an exceptional experience to our clients. Our chatbot technology enables Ellie to learn, adapt, improve and grow more intelligent with every interaction.” said Vince DiMascio, BAL’s Chief Information Officer. Ellie’s vocabulary and knowledge base will be expanding to encompass answers to more complex questions in the future.
Ellie resides at BAL’s H-1B Electronic Registration Resources Center, which clients can access by logging onto their Cobalt account.
Media Contact: Emily Albrecht Senior Director — Marketing & Communications ealbrecht@bal.com 469-559-0174
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.
Copyright © 2020 Berry Appleman & Leiden LLP. All rights reserved. Reprinting or digital redistribution to the public is permitted only with the express written permission of Berry Appleman & Leiden LLP. For inquiries please contact copyright@bal.com.
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.
Cobalt® provides global businesses with a premier destination for strategic end-to-end case management
SAN FRANCISCO, February 6, 2018 – Today Berry Appleman & Leiden (BAL) LLP, one of the world’s largest immigration law firms, launched its next-generation Cobalt® digital immigration services platform. The new Cobalt features the industry’s first mobile immigration application, enabling anytime, anywhere case management across Android and iOS devices. In addition, the secure, cloud-based platform is ISO/IEC 27001 certified, features an intuitive, user-friendly interface and delivers a faster application speed that will accelerate the global immigration process for BAL’s portfolio of corporate clients.
“In an increasingly complex global economy, an effective immigration strategy is a competitive necessity for every company that does business internationally,” said Jeremy Fudge, BAL Managing Partner. “With Cobalt, today’s global mobility leaders can transform their global immigration processes to meet the challenges and opportunities of a digital age while giving their employees a more streamlined, differentiated experience.”
With its breakthrough app, user-friendly interface and top-notch information security, Cobalt makes it easier for BAL’s corporate clients to do their jobs, run their businesses and give their employees a great experience. Specific benefits include:
“For years, we’ve been at the immigration forefront, driving technologies that keep our clients ahead in a fast-changing world. It’s ingrained in our company’s culture to apply a technology and innovation lens to everything we do – and at every level – with an eye toward what’s next. With a product roadmap that embraces the latest, including Artificial Intelligence, machine learning and automation, this release is part of our agenda to bring clients inventive technology solutions designed to advance global immigration,” commented Fudge.
Also today, BAL released a new vision paper on the role of innovation in an increasingly complex global immigration environment. The paper outlines actions that today’s business and legal experts can take to stay ahead in a rapidly changing landscape. The full paper, “Innovation in Global Immigration Law: Where Expertise, Technology and the Human Experience Meet,” is available for download here.
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 comprehensive services from 18 offices across six continents. BAL and its leaders are highly ranked in every major legal publication, including Best Lawyers, Chambers, The Legal 500, and Who’s Who Legal. Non-U.S. offices are operated by affiliated entities in those countries.
IMPACT – MEDIUM
What is the change? The Thai Embassy in Singapore has said that that visa processing times will be left to the discretion of individual visa officers and that it will no longer abide by standard two-day processing times.
What does the change mean? Visa applicants should expect longer processing times and should submit applications no later than five to 10 business days before they plan to travel.
Background: The embassy says that, with the change, the minimum processing time will be three days (including the day of submission), but that applicants should leave five to 10 working days, particularly during busy holiday seasons.
BAL Analysis: Visa applicants should take note of the change and adjust their schedules if necessary.
This alert has been provided by the BAL Global Practice group in Singapore. For additional information, please contact singapore@bal.com.