Communication Channels

All telephone calls can be forwarded by our central switchboard to the desired recipient if he is available, be he at his desk or any other extension at our Head Office, in another office of ours in Italy or abroad, at home, or in any other place where a mobile phone can be reached.

Therefore, the only phone number you really need to know is: +39 02 76204.1 (“39” being the country code for Italy, and 02 the area code for Milan). Please note that since 19 December 1998 you need to dial “02” also when calling from Milan, and that from the same date the “0” in “02” must now not be dropped when calling from abroad.

At the number above you will find an operator from 08.30 a.m. to 09.00 p.m., and normally your calls will be answered even much later, while late in the night and during bank holidays you may have to leave a message with an answering machine, which is routinely checked once or more every twelve hours.

Furthermore, clients and correspondents needing this level of service may obtain access, to an emergency number, which is not publicly disclosed, where we can be contacted around the clock, 365 days a year, whenever our central switchboard is not staffed.

All SLS members are equipped with cellular phones. Personal mobile phone numbers, however, are also not disclosed, to allow the switchboard to filter incoming calls so that mobile phones may be kept reasonably free, in order to allow us to promptly contact, in case of need, the professional involved.

All our switchboard operators are bound to introduce themselves when answering your call, to forward it to the intended recipient or another suitable SLS member after having identified the caller and the matter concerned, or to take any message you may care to leave. Whenever your call cannot be accepted immediately, we strive to return it within twenty-four hours. If this does not happen, it is safe to assume that your message has been lost and never reached the intended recipient. In such unlikely occurence, we should be grateful if you contact us again and mention time and recipient of your previous call.

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However, you might prefer to call directly one of our other offices, instead of our central switchboard, perhaps because this is more comfortable and cheaper from your current location.

Therefore, please find below a brief directory of the relevant numbers, which you may copy if you so wish, or access here at your convenience, where they are always kept up-to-date::

• Milan Office of our IP & Competition Dept.: +39 02 7620460;
• Milan Office of our Labour Law & Related Matters Dept.: +39 02 861071;
• Milan Office of our Tax Department: +39 02 762049;
• South Milanese Province & Pavia Office: +39 02 94963208;
• Bergamo & Brescia Office: +39 035 0745701;
• Genoa Office: +39 010 2474035;
• Monza Office: +39 039 3900524;
• Rome Office: +39 06 80690224;
• United Kingdom Office: +44 20 7409 1384 or 7493 3395;
• Japan Office: +81 36459-2113;
• Bulgaria Office: +359 2 831 9586;
• Romania Office: +40 21 337 0730;
• Croatia Office: +385 1 4818972.

Some of these numbers can forward your calls to other offices, or establish an audioconference with a member of the Firm located elsewhere.

Late at night and during holidays, or should an operator not be available for any reason, your call might be redirected to our central switchboard, or again you might have to leave a message with a local answering machine.

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Our Head Office telephony is ISDN, more precisely Euro-ISDN2e (thus allowing switched-circuit 128 Kb/s point-to-point data transfer with other ISDN users), or fiber optic- and TCP-IP-based; and so are the other lines leased to the Firm by local phone companies in other regions and countries. Our cellular phones are GSM or UTMS, in the latter case allowing mobile videoconferencing.

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With regard to Internet telephony, or “Voice over IP” Studio Legale Sutti presently supports IBM Internet Connection Phone ® for OS/2 (free), and Revolutionary Software’s InterCom for OS/2 ® (shareware); and will probably support IBM’s JavaPhone , because of its promised interoperability between different platforms,… as soon as they start keeping that promise.

Our experience indicates, however, that point-to-point Internet telephony is not practical for business uses unless a bandwidth of at least 33,600 bit/sec can be dedicated to the conversation and sustained for all of its duration.

All of our members have personal Internet e-mail addresses, which, strictly speaking, are not “secret” (and can be easily guessed, being mostly in the form “forename.name@sutti.com), but are not routinely disclosed, as all those individuals corresponding with the Firm on the Internet are strongly encouraged and advised to do so through our main e-mail address at maildesk@sutti.com (formerly sutti@ibm.net), from where their messages are notified and forwarded to the addressee and/or other appropriate recipients in real time through our internal e-mail system or by any other means. This allows our correspondents to profit from our very strict policies and controls regarding messages checking, distribution, encryption, backup; and, above all, to avoid any risk that their message is not promptly dealt with, owing to the possible absence of the addressee or his inability to access his Internet mail.

On the other hand, a number of specific addresses which are mainly used for internal purposes are freely accessible, amongst which: “accounting”, “marketing”, “edp”, “security”; “company-commercial”, “ip”, “labour”, “environmental”; “rome”, “genoa”, “london”, “tokyo”, “sofia”; all of them of course with the suffix “@sutti.com”. Please understand that hyperlinks to those addresses are not provided in order to limit their targetting by spammers who develop their databases through automatic detection of mail addresses in pages published on the Web.

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Please see the page describing our policy with respect to languages to check which correspondence languages are currently supported, and that on supported text and data formats with respect to possible attachments to your messages.

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Clients and correspondents having a very intensive off-line exchange of messages and data with SLS’s members may alternatively obtain a direct access to our internal Lotus cc:Mail ® system, by

• requesting a password from our IS Manager;
• installing the appropriate client software (which is available for most platforms, including IBM OS/2 Warp , Apple Macintosh, and various flavours of DOS, Unix and Microsoft Windows);
• and establishing a point-to-point connection with the extension dedicated to our Post Office gateway in our premises at Milan, Via Montenapoleone.

Messages flowing through our internal e-mail system are intrinsically encrypted and password-protected, and enjoy a medium-high level of security.

For further information in this respect, please do not hesitate to contact us.

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If you are a COMPUSERVE ® user, you might wish to contact us at our COMPUSERVE mailbox 100524,3014, thus profiting from features such as return receipts and a relatively higher degree of security than the risible one enjoyed by unencrypted Internet e-mail.

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Finally, while we consider videotex as technically obsolete, we still have a Videotel mailbox (no. 222117283), which we check from time to time. Videotel is the videotex service offered by Telecom Italia, which you can access at the phone number “1652” in most Italian cities, via modem, standard ITU-T V.23 (that is, asyncronous 75/1200 bit/sec.!), by an ad hoc terminal or a PC with specific videotex communication software.

Videotel should also be connected to, and exchange messages with, other analogous, albeit more successful, services, such as the British Prestel, the German Bildschirmtext, and, above all, the French Télétel, better known under the name of its terminals, i.e., “Minitel”. But if you are French, you are probably aware of methods to send Internet mail from Minitel terminals…

All mail addressed to Studio Legale Sutti may be delivered to its Head Office at Via Montenapoleone 8, 20121 Milan (Italy), where our Company-Commercial Dept. and our IP and Competition Dept. are located, and from where it is forwarded in our care to the appropriate recipient.

If your mail contains documents to be urgently delivered in original to a specific office, you might wish to send it instead directly to the other addresses which are indicated with specific regard to:

• the Milan office of our Labour & Related Matters Dept.;
• the Milan office of our Tax Dept.;
• our South Milanese Province and Pavia Office;
• our Bergamo & Brescia Office;
• our Genoa Office;
• our Rome Office;
• our London Office;
• our Tokyo Office;
• our Sofia Office;
• our Belgrade Office;
• our Bucharest Office;
• our Zagabria Office.

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Please see the page describing our policy with respect to languages to check which correspondence languages are currently supported.

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Texts and other data addressed to the Firm can be delivered in digital form, in any of the supported formats and preferably encrypted, on most removable media, and in particular on:

• Cd-Roms, Video Cds, Cd-Rs, Cd-RWs, DVDs, DVD-RAMs, DVD-RW+s.
• 5″¼ or 3″½ floppy-disks (formatted from 360Kbyte to 2.88 Mbyte),
• LS-120 and Iomega Zip cartridges:
• 3″½ magneto-optical disks, both re-writable and O-Rom.

Analog audio and video can be delivered on

• stereo 7 audiotapes;
• compact discs;
• VHS, S-VHS, Hi-8 videotapes.

Desktop point-to-point videoconference facilities via ISDN are available in our Head Office (at the number +39 02 76204802) and at our United Kingdom Office (at the number +44 20 7493 3401), under Person-to-Person/2 ®, an IBM product, which was eventually included in the OS/2 Warp v3 Bonus Pack, requiring the use at both sides of an IBM Action Media II card. Such facilities will be upgraded to the ITU-T H.323 standard in the near future. Please make beforehand the necessary arrangements by telephone with the local switchboard.

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With regard to mobile videoconferencing, a few of our members are equipped with UTMS (i.e., 3G) cellular phones, which invariably allow users to make and receive video-calls (where the local carrier offers this feature). Please see the page on telephony for more details.

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With regard to Internet videoconferencing, Studio Legale Sutti supports Cu-SeeMe, a program originally developed by Cornell University (if your are an OS/2 user, you may access the Cu-SeeMe/2 Home Page to obtain the OS/2 version, with a number of features not found in the Windows or the Mac versions; otherwise you may find the standard versions for the latter mainstream platforms at the White Pine CU-SeeMe Page).

Our experience indicates, however, that Internet videoconferencing is not practical for business purposes, because of the low frame rates and resolutions inherent in the limited available bandwith, and its extreme variability during the connection time.

All data addressed to the Firm may be immediately delivered, when it is reasonable according to their nature, size and confidentiality via a dial-up, point-to-point digital transmission to our Head Office, through the use of any communication software that is able to establish a connection via modem or ISDN.

In particular, any transfer of data may be operated via modem, after making the necessary arrangements, by dialing the number +39 02 76204803, in all the ITU-T standards up to V.34+ and V.90, with V.42bis or MNP-10 hardware compression. All most common data transfer protocol are supported, including X-modem, various flavours of Y-modem, Kermit, COMPUSERVE-B, Z-modem, and so on.

More efficiently, the same transfer may take place via a mono- or bi-channel ISDN connection to the number +39 02 7620450 (in Milan), with a sustained speed of 128 Kbits/sec., without the uncertainties of a TCP/IP connection over the Internet. All the lines of our Head Offices, and some lines of our secondary offices, are standard Euro-ISDN2e BRIs.