Situation

Leading East Coast based law firm, Colin Biggers & Paisley had grown from 100 to over 500 employees across offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, with continued growth expected. First established in 1900 as a boutique firm in Sydney, key mergers occurred with Melbourne-based insurance firm Monahan & Rowell in 2012 and Brisbane-based firm Hemming & Hart in 2013. Now a national legal practice with an international reach, it became evident the firm’s document management system needed a refresh so all employees would have access to the same information anywhere and on any device. In 2018, the firm made the decision to move away from their legacy system, a bespoke solution built upon SharePoint. The old system had served the firm for nearly a decade and was now outdated and unwieldy.

Once the decision had been made to choose an outside operating system, a steering committee was assembled to undertake extensive research into a suitable document and email management vendor. Following an exhaustive assessment process of vendors with a modern cloud platform for Legal, iManage Work 10 was chosen by an overwhelming majority of the committee. Morae was then selected as the implementation provider, based on confidence in them as the largest and most experienced iManage partner globally to deliver deployments of this complexity.

Approach

In August 2018, Colin Biggers & Paisley began the design workshops. The process was led by Morae and included the steering committee and key end users. Within this framework, Morae completely re-engineered the firm’s content management structure to include best practices for folder structures metadata, security and the integration of iManage with Outlook to allow for more efficient filing of emails. Sam Sofianos, Chief Information Officer at Colin Biggers & Paisley, who was instrumental in leading the migration project said, “I was hugely impressed with Morae, to the point that I wouldn’t consider selecting any other partner if I had to do this again. When it came to migrating data and the structures that Morae dealt with on the previous legacy bespoke system, they handled everything with aplomb. There was no challenge too great, no issues they couldn’t handle, and everything was mapped out comprehensibly. The way data was migrated in tranches was simply executed perfectly.”

Result

Implementation was completed in November 2018 and user adoption has since been a continued success. Morae was involved in the design of the DMS structure all the way through to training of the firm’s staff and post go-live support. Everyone felt they were part of the transformation due to the inclusion of end-users from start to finish. Partners at Colin Biggers & Paisley have found productivity has increased and at the same time, IT support requests have been drastically reduced. The biggest positive users have reported when using iManage Work 10 has been the search functionality. The speed information within the firm can be found and a simplification of internal systems with flexibility of use across all devices has increased productivity and efficiency.

Some unintended benefits of migrating to iManage Work 10 in the iManage Cloud are still being realized today at Colin Biggers & Paisley. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit Australia, forcing all staff to work from home, there was no downtime, and it did not impact productivity. The DMS has allowed all staff to remotely login and access documents without any challenges as the Cloud allows scalability, both up and down, to suit changing business requirements immediately. None of this would have been a possibility with the previous legacy system. Use of the Cloud has also meant security has never been compromised because encryption of data is far better than most organizations are able to provide. This demonstrates the resilience of the technology now being used at Colin Biggers & Paisley whilst the new normal working ways are still being established.

Planning for the Future

Even with the enormous benefits migrating to iManage Work 10 in the Cloud has brought, the firm is not resting on their laurels. “Colin Biggers & Paisley remain focused on moving into the future with their document management system as they continue to grow and I look forward to the partnership blossoming with Morae to achieve this,” stated Chris Davis, Managing Director APAC at Morae. Sam Sofianos echoed the sentiment, adding, “Overwhelmingly, Morae has been the best partner to choose to work with on this project with and we look forward to our continuing relationship with them.”