White paper from document management platform illustrates just how sophisticated the technology has become
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The legal department in a huge global energy corporation was having trouble. Their IT department had furnished them with an enterprise file sharing platform to store and share their documents. Legal, though, was struggling to find examples or past work for precedent on that system. The search function wasn’t optimized for legal users, slowing down their operations and preventing agility when it was needed most. It was costing them thousands of legal man-hours every ear.
The legal operations team did their research, and contacted iManage, a work product management platform designed specifically for law firms and legal departments. iManage implemented their platform, including powerful and personalized search technology, designed to mobilize precedent and improve the efficiency of overall legal operations, while ensuring robust security and governance. Their analysis showed that iManage would reduce the amount of time lost searching for documents, while delivering new feature and capabilities to make the team more efficient and productive.
Michael Powers, Product Marketing Director with iManage, explains “Not only does it make the individual lawyer more productive, more efficient and more secure, but if you take that capability and multiply it across a law firm or across a legal department, then the entire department becomes more agile.” He continued “They are empowered to be more responsive to the business, more likely to deliver better legal outcomes, able to make better use of legal precedent and best practices because they can find them efficiently. At the same time, and this is very important in the current landscape, their work product is more carefully governed and secured against both internal and external threats.”
Modern document management is a relatively new solution in the in-house legal space. It emerged out of legacy content systems to develop crucial functionalities of its own, more focused on the creation and collaboration involved in legal work. iManage offers new functionalities like secure document sharing, personalized search, mobility, version control, and workflow integration, that enable professionals to work intuitively and productively.
The search functionality that drove the energy customer’s decision to engage with iManage enables lawyers to pull from the nearest precedent of a past indemnity clause, for example, and build their new clause on that, rather than starting from scratch. Collaboration, too, is key, and iManage is built to share these often highly sensitive documents securely with a simultaneous editing functionality that prevents the circulation of multiple unreconciled drafts. Even sharing documents externally, both outside the legal department and outside the organization, is underpinned by iManage’s security, allowing external input in a way that is audited, trackable, governed, and secure.
iManage recognizes that successful customer implementations require more than just technology. With this in mind, iManage designed their platform for rapid, seamless adoption. They provide a wealth of training resources and have fine-tuned their platform based on a detailed understanding of the way professionals work. iManage interviewed and studied hundreds of professionals doing their jobs in order to understand how to make their platform as intuitive and easy-to-use as possible. “We have had customers train their teams on the core concepts in as little as 30 minutes,” Powers says. “We place a great deal of importance on delivering an intuitive, consumer-like experience that works the way people want to work.”
As a platform designed for efficiency and scalability, iManage has proven its value to its users during the COVID-19 pandemic, ensuring collaboration and security as workforces went remote. Security has proven even more crucial as operations move outside the shields of a corporate firewall. Powers says that iManage is built with a Zero Trust protocol, a next-generation security framework that ensures the highest level of protection for critical data assets.
The team at iManage says they developed this white paper to better define the concept of modern document management, and more importantly to illustrate how it delivers better outcomes for law departments and enterprises.
“Our goal is to demonstrate how better technology can enable better performance”, said Powers. “We want to empower people to manage information more productively and securely.”
