Being a digital-first law firm

Paul Walker, technical director at iManage, asks ‘is now the right time to ask for more technology?’ Absolutely.

2020 has proven ground-breaking in so many ways. How many blogs have started with the words Covid-19, remote working, new normal, and revolution in the first paragraph? It’s easy to get drawn into the negatives of the situation, but that’s not for us.

This year has provided a unique opportunity for law firms, legal teams, and professional service businesses – and the software companies that supply them – to test their solutions under extreme duress and validate the true value of their years of digital transformation projects. What has been the result?

Well, simply put, we receive daily messages of gratitude from our cloud IT customers, which were able to sleep well as thousands of their colleagues were able to carry on their daily work on shared internet connections, at the same time as their families consumed their entire bandwidth with Netflix streaming. Cloud and engineering developments in the last 10 years have ensured that we were all more able than ever to keep calm and carry on working at home. This is not to say the experience of non-cloud customers has been bad, but undoubtedly additional measures would have been required for effective remote working.

As the first phase priority for most companies was ‘make it work’, now we see digital-focused firms asking ‘how can we make remote working better, more efficient, more productive, more secure, and more collaborative?’.

Many of us are suffering from Teams/Zoom meeting fatigue, which has resulted in pushing our real work into the early mornings and evenings. Firms need to start understanding their teams’ working patterns better and find ways to better support them and drive out inefficiencies in completing tasks.

Recently iManage saw an opportunity to help clients overcome some of these inefficiencies through the acquisition of Closing Folders, a company that automates what’s still often a highly manual and physical process of closing checklists, signature collation, and closing books. These processes often pose a big risk for many legal teams. At the very least automating them means the lawyer will not need to work the weekend when the deal slips a week and hundreds of documents need to be updated with a new date! They can spend that time at the Zoom quiz instead.

We still face an undefined amount time before normality resumes, when it does, will we have seen a revolution? I don’t believe so, but I do believe firms will hold greater value in digital transformation projects – not just to support business continuity, but in how technology can solve key business objectives, regardless of where the workforce is based.

Locking down the move to cloud

Geoff Hornsby, general manager, EMEA at iManage, discusses the importance of cloud – from Zero Trust security to improving client experience with a cloud-based DMS.

The ubiquitous need to facilitate remote work in 2020 led to a surge in the use of cloud applications as law firms and legal departments found it invaluable to ensure business continuity in the early days of the pandemic.

Cloud technology truly came of age as the must-have platform this year as it not only enabled access to documents from any location, but also facilitated new ways of collaborating and sharing knowledge for professionals who are now no longer all working under the same roof.

But as we prepare for several more months of lockdown, there’s still a lot of benefits organisations can achieve with a cloud platform in the long term. As our CEO Neil Araujo referenced in a previous post, firms that continue to be nimble and execute digital strategies quickly will have a distinct competitive advantage throughout the pandemic, and we have seen this first-hand with our customers.

Increased security

Before the onset of Covid-19, our clients told us that the number one barrier to cloud migrations was security concerns. What companies are now finding due to the necessity of remote work is that some cloud platforms not only provide the security they require but largely deliver even more.

For example, industry-leading Zero Trust security on a cloud platform always assumes external and internal threats exist in the network at all times. It may sound paranoid, but it’s especially important in a remote work environment. When looking at a cloud migration, every firm should ask their vendor what their policy is around Zero Trust.

Improved user experience

Cloud technology, like a cloud document management system (DMS), also eases the process of managing workloads when staff members fall ill or are on holiday – as documents are accessible in a single location aiding in business continuity during these challenging times.

It also includes features that enhance the ability to access workspaces, documents, and files from a familiar interface, increasing users’ ability to be more productive in a remote setting. Seamless integration with other applications also helps increase adoption, as well as simplifies onboarding new users.

Facilitating management needs

Finally, cloud aids managers in their efforts to find new ways to replicate processes they used to have in the office.

We’ve seen clients that have embraced the capabilities of a cloud DMS are benefitting from an aerial viewpoint of their staff and department or firm matters. Using dashboards, they can get the quick overview they need to ensure the smooth running of the business whether in or out of the office.

At iManage, we too have been part of that movement, using cloud systems to help increase productivity, collaboration and ensure business continuity for our clients, no matter where our staff are working.

In the current climate, it is little wonder why the attitude for many firms has shifted from not if they will move to the cloud, but when.

Reinventing how work gets done in a post-pandemic world

Neil Araujo, CEO at iManage, discusses the increased necessity of digital transformation as we continue to work in a pandemic world and beyond.

Digital transformation was a boardroom topic long before Covid-19 hit. But the pandemic served to bring it into sharper view virtually overnight.

As law firms, corporate legal departments, and other professional services firms had to move fluidly to survive the upending of ‘business as usual’ over the last six months, organisations are now looking toward what’s next.

They’ve witnessed that the hastened changes to new ways of working have actually brought new advantages – and this realisation has longer term ramifications for how law firms operate and how lawyers in general will get work done.

Challenges like: What are the most effective ways for your professionals to work together and collaborate irrespective of location? What are the best ways to share knowledge across the firm when you’re not sitting under the same roof? How can you ensure that sensitive content is properly secured and governed when your people are working remotely?

To answer these questions, the nimblest organisations have moved quickly to execute digital strategies. Those with tools and processes in place have a distinct competitive advantage.

Resiliency, efficiency, and security are essential

In this era of remote working, collaboration and resilience take on even greater importance to ensure quality and uninterrupted service delivery. Law firms and legal departments will need to re-evaluate traditional approaches for getting work done, take a closer look at workflows, consider technologies that enable faster, more accurate access to institutional knowledge across the organisation, and identify new and improved ways to drive efficiency and resilience.

As part of this, the ability to access critical documents and emails at any time, from any location, on any device matters more than ever, as does the performance and resiliency of the systems that manage these files. While the cloud is invaluable in this situation, not all clouds are created equal, and firms should carefully do their research to ensure the service levels, performance and features meet and exceed user expectations.

Security risks increase with remote work because there are more endpoints to protect and new ways to access critical data. As more work is digital, the threat profile becomes more serious, and the risk of a security incident only increases.

As a result, legal organisations need an integrated, comprehensive best-practices approach to security protection that encompasses active threat detection, need-to-know security controls, and the ability to manage security policies at scale. These capabilities need to be designed to secure and govern across the entire information lifecycle. Anything less is putting your client’s sensitive data and your firm’s reputation at risk.

With a distributed workforce in play for the foreseeable future, innovative technologies that drive collaboration and teamwork, support new ways of working, and allow knowledge sharing to continue unabated will be invaluable. With a digital strategy that delivers these outcomes, organisations can emerge stronger, more resilient and agile and with better service delivery than before.