CASE STUDY: Law In Order

June 26th, 2006:When your document-centric organisation is a legal practice, the growing emphasis on compliance coupled with the exponentially increasing number of documents choking archives make document management a necessity.

Like financial institutions, legal firms have far greater expectations put on their levels of compliance, document retention and ability to retrieve information at will than most other market areas outside of health and government.

After many years of using a PCDocs system – or nothing – to eke out its document management processes, Australia’s Phillips Fox turned to Trackfile to develop a streamlined, organisation-wide solution. A large law firm with a long history, it finally realised that the time had come for a more effective document management solution – in fact, this was paramount.

Unfortunately, for many people – and by extension many companies – knowledge sharing is not a force of habit. Yes, we all have different systems of working with our colleagues and sharing information, and may even use very complex and effective systems to do this.

"Document management is a fundamental for legal firms." says John Duckett, General Manager of IT, Phillips Fox. "Trackfile was originally developed for Phillips Fox Sydney, we were the original client. When the firm became a corporate entity five years ago it was decided that Trackfile would be become the standard DMS for all Phillips Fox offices."

Once approved, the installation commenced and took four months to roll out Trackfile to all Australian and New Zealand offices. During this time Trackfile – the company – worked closely with Phillips Fox to ensure all of its requirements were met and there were no significant interruptions to its business. Because it was developing the system specifically for Phillips Fox too, if a problem surfaced or a new feature required it could be acted upon and resolved quickly. This relationship still exists.

"We discuss our requirements with Trackfile, they look into developing a solution", says Duckett. "As their largest customer, and the most demanding in terms of functionality, they try to look after us.

"All matter-related documents need to be stored in the DMS. Trackfile understood this very well, and have recently provided additional functionality to enable emails to be stored against relevant matters."

Coming from a PCDocs – or no – document management background, the switch to a complete Trackfile solution proved to be a major change for the company’s everyday workflow.

With many local servers in branch offices and no consistent document management system in place, the move to a centralised Database in particular changed the way Phillips Fox functioned, and raised some concerns about performance for remote offices.

"In the end, upgrading to a robust document management system has no doubt proven to be a boon for the firm."

These concerns were abated by re-deploying existing servers to handle local documents and by purchasing a new central server from HP to run the companies central Oracle database. The central database stores all the information about document locations, while the actual files all reside of local branch servers.

While this central database allows documents to be accessed throughout the organisation, the files are stored locally at branches. This can cause latency issues when accessing files remotely, however, this happens quite infrequently so the impact on workflow is negligible.

Phillips Fox had already integrated Trackfile into its internet, intranet, extranet and workflow solutions, so porting it to its document management system was relatively painless.

Once the installation was complete, the company found Trackfile’s intuitive and flexible document management interface to be a great drawcard. Ease of use is an attribute that Phillips Fox continually emphasises when it comes to the software and, with around 1,300 staff now using the system, Duckett says that the company is experiencing, "More engagement from practice and less aversion to change."

This level of acceptance and ease of use is important for legal companies like Phillips Fox as they have strict internal document management policies in place that must be adhered to.

"All matter related documents need to be stored in the DMS." said Duckett. "Trackfile houses all of our policiesand procedures."

In the end, upgrading to a robust document management system has no doubt proven to be a boon for the firm. Even without looking at infrastructure savings, the benefits of centralised document management include greater information control, higher levels of document availability and greater accountability and compliance.

Most importantly for a law firm, the right document can be found at the right time.