Robbins Russell is a boutique firm that provides experienced representation in high-stakes legal matters such as trial litigation; Supreme Court and general appellate litigation; and government investigations and enforcement proceedings. Their clients include numerous Fortune 500 companies, financial institutions, hedge funds, defense contractors, technology companies, and major accounting firms. They also represent a wide variety of mid-sized companies, government entities, associations, and individuals.
Challenge
As Robbins Russell grew from five partners, they discovered their shared network drive no longer served as the best solution for their document needs.
“When the firm started out, they had been operating with the thought of ‘We don’t need bureaucracy,’ which they interpreted to include all these systems [like document management],” explains Dana Wesley Sarti, Litigation Support Manager, Robbins Russell. Instead, the firm relied on a shared network drive which initially had little required structure. Although the firm did slowly impose more organization in their files, they found that with a growing firm and growing file numbers, their ad-hoc process was no longer cutting it.
Solution
Robbins Russell knew their firm needed a document management system that was better suited to their growing organization, and they also knew that as a small firm without an in-house IT specialist, they didn't want to maintain on-premises hardware. Thus, they began exploring cloud-based options for their document management.
Although they considered several competing products, they ultimately chose iManage based on a critical feature: version indexing.
“We chose iManage because [the chief competitor product] could only index official final versions. You could not search for the interim versions [using that product] and you could in iManage. We decided that when it comes down to it, that was going to be a feature we needed,” said Sarti.
Benefits
Consistent uptime, everywhere
Right away, Robbins Russell users benefitted from the industry-leading, reliable uptime. This was an improvement over their previous on-premises shared file drive, which needed backups and updates that required the system to be down.
Sarti enthused, “I think that's one of the things that helped make the pain of learning these new systems better, was immediately it was always available. That was fantastic.”
With the consistent uptime and superior mobility that iManage Work 10 in the Cloud offered, users could access their files from anywhere. This was a huge plus for when their lawyers and staff were working outside of the office and made it much easier to remain productive during the pandemic.
Security and audit trails prove invaluable
Post-deployment, one of the first things that Robbins Russell did was add iManage Security Policy Manager (SPM). For a small firm like Robbins Russell, SPM simplified security considerably. Previously, the firm had relied on active directory groups, which was more cumbersome to set up and see document security at a glance. Now, SPM makes it easy to know who has access for reading and/or authoring, and who did what when.
In addition to the security concerns that SPM addressed, iManage Work offers another key feature: audit trails. Robbins Russell has several clients that have HIPAA requirements. With their original file system, Sarti said, “The ability to produce documented audit trails for access to information that they are also obligated to keep confidential, that was something that was just horrifically onerous until we got our data into iManage.” Now, the audit trails in iManage Work make meeting these requirements much easier.
A move worth making
Robbins Russell is pleased with their choice to move straight to iManage Work 10 in the Cloud for their document management. “The amount of overhead and the amount of expertise one has to have in house compared to the cost of having iManage in the Cloud makes the choice [between on-premises and the cloud] in my mind, not even a competition," said Sarti.
