Australian law firm Sparke Helmore has implemented Autonomy iManage 8.5 to provide matter-related document management for over 650 staff.

Sparke Helmore has undergone massive growth and change in the last 10 years. It operates in eight locations across Australia and shares many clients across all locations which made it essential to find an affordable and effective solution to better support clients and share knowledge. Peter Campbell, CIO and Knowledge Director, said the iManage solution was implemented in 2010 within one year of project approval.

“The new document management system allows matter-centric filing, so all documents and emails relating to a matter are stored together. This has also allowed us to start phasing-out all physical filing of documents for some of our matter types.”

A project to move to matter-centric filing commenced on August 1, 2009. The new system first went live in early July 2010 and the rollout was completed in September by solutions provider Trinogy Systems who helped to bring it in on time and on budget

“This project required sustained and collaborative effort from the whole IT team working closely with our vendors,” said Campbell.

“We implemented many innovative ideas to minimise the impact of the change by engaging the firm in the concept of electronic matter filing well ahead of time. We managed to get almost the entire firm to turn up to training through heightened awareness and tangible management buy-in to the objectives of the project.

“We achieved a lot with fairly limited resources by having a high degree of ownership, understanding how the firm works with documents using behavioural profiling, focusing on the high impact areas for the business and conscripting in anyone that could help.”

The project included the migration of over six million documents and emails from a Hummingbird DM5 repository to iManage 8.5. Two repositories (one in Sydney and one in Newcastle) were consolidated into one single nationwide repository in Sydney.

"This has made it much simpler to manage and has also allowed us to split the storage up based on more logical factors like the age of the matter," said Campbell.

"The migration was achieved using out of the box tools that came with iManage from Autonomy, along with a number of techniques, scripts and tools that Trinogy systems provided. With their extensive experience migrating other firms/systems in the past we were able to avoid purchasing any extra tools."

Email management

Email Management and automated email filing was also introduced, as well as a new full text index. Sparke Helmore is using Exchange 2003 for email in tandem with Symantec Enterprise Vault. The desktop OS is Windows XP with Microsoft Office 2003 and Outlook 2003.

"We had an option to upgrade the version of Office we were using at the same time as this project, however we decided that it would be inflicting too much change on the end users. As it was, the change from one DM system to another one and introducing automated email filing and a new search engine was enough for the end users to absorb. We will look at the next version of Office (probably 2010) in Sep/Oct 2011," said Campbell.

"The iManage product and Enterprise Vault integrate well to make the transition of emails from the Vault into the iManage system seamless for the end users. The email filing component is one of the most popular changes that have come out of the project. The iManage email management module assists users with prompting for a filing location, through to automatically filing email threads. This has enabled the firm to file many more emails correctly while also reducing the amount of time spent filing."

Dealing with PDF document assembly, a big part of document management at a law firm, was previously handled by a small number of staff using Adobe Acrobat Writer prior to the introduction of iManage.

In addition to rolling out iManage, Sparke Helmore has implemented Docscorp's PDFDocs across the whole firm, making it easier for a much wider group of people to create and manipulate PDFs. For core document automation a set of in-house written VBA scripts are used to pick up information from databases and populate documents with that information.

"We refreshed this as part of the upgrade and will be looking to streamline it further with the next iteration of Office coming up in the future," said Campbell.

A document extranet has also been established to enable collaboration with the firm’s clients, while a new management reporting capability allows administrators to track usage and monitor behaviour patterns of the iManage system.

This has provided a strong measure of the success of the new system in encouraging users to store emails related to a matter in the iManage repository. There were an average of 10,000 emails filed a month in the old DM5 system whereas 600,000 emails were filed in the first three months since iManage went live.

In addition to being able to search emails and documents from the one interface, Sparke Helmore lawyers are now benefiting from a more stable desktop environment, with desktop/Word crashes estimated to have been reduced by 30%.

Saving people time and reducing frustration is a big plus now, as conducting full text searches of the repository takes less than 10 seconds rather than 5-10 minutes (as was the case previously). The new text index utilising the Autonomy Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) Server was an unexpected benefit of selecting iManage. Shortly after Sparke Helmore acquired the iManage system, Autonomy acquired Interwoven and announced the integration of IDOL as the search engine.

“We have found the scalability and power of the IDOL engine to be significant and it certainly underpins a better search experience. Even better, when we eventually move to indexing other repositories and implementing universal search we will use the same index, code base and infrastructure - it will be only configuration and licensing which will open up a significantly expanded feature set. The improved search tool, tidied up metadata and quick tips training has vastly improved search – both in anecdotal feedback and hard results on the time taken for searches estimated at saving 20 minutes a lawyer per month,” said Campbell.

Knowledge management

The knowledge repository and contribution process have improved drastically through a very simple ‘right-click contribute’ process, better search facilities and improved /simpler classification.

When Sparke Helmore staff find a document on a matter that they think is useful (for instance a well written 'advice') they can 'right click' and 'flag for contribution' from within the iManage interface. This means flagging a document that could be a useful contribution to knowledge is very quick and easy. The practice group/team can then review a search folder on a particular matter (or across all matters) to see what people have considered eligible for contribution.

They can sort out the important documents from the not so important ones and then submit them to the Precedents team with another 'right click' action. The metadata around the document is captured from its location/context in the system, leaving only a few more electronic fields to fill out before the document is ready to process. Contribution rates have increased as has end user satisfaction as staff don't have to do nearly as much to get documents added to the knowledge base.

Digitising workflow

The level of digitisation of paper documents varies by practice group. The only 'Golden Rule' is that if it is electronic, file it in iManage. Some teams choose to scan all their paper correspondence received into the system using MFDs.

They scan it then file it into the correct location in iManage. Some teams have elected to maintain a paper file for any correspondence not available electronically as they have a need to physically view/handle it or bring it to courts, where paper is still the most common medium. Sparke Helmore hasn't got hung up on reducing paper as the driver is more one around collaboration, searching and classification.

Staff use iManage mostly for collaboration, although an intranet provides a place for lawyers to collaborate on non-client facing initiatives. The iManage portal is used for external collaboration.

Collaboration is solely via email (and phone). Sparke Helmore has trialled a few other social media type applications but hasn't found a significant/killer application which has driven widespread adoption.

As part of its centralisation of content, Sparke Helmore has virtualised the application servers, Dell servers running Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2005.

"We have virtualised the application servers however on the vendor's recommendation we have chosen not to virtualise the Database or Index server. These servers have demanding I/O and performance requirements so we were more comfortable with a physical system (at least initially).," said Campbell.

Sparke Hellmore At a Glance
* Elite Enterprise practice management system
* Visualfiles case management/workflow system
* iManage document management
* Metastorm Workflow Management
* BigHand Digital Dictation
* Interaction CRM
* Docscorp PDFDocs Desktop & Formfiller
* Office 2003, Outlook 2003
* Exchange 2003 email
* Enterprise Vault email archiving