Gillespie Macandrew is a leading Scottish law firm providing legal services to businesses, individuals and their families. The firm’s clients include individuals, landowners, SMEs and large corporate clients and a key focus is to develop innovative solutions to delivering their advice, tailored to every clients’ needs. With such an approach, it is key for the firm to give structure, security and searchability to their business documentation and industry knowledge, including matters, emails, case history and more. With the firm recognising that their greatest asset was the collective intelligence stored within their work products, it was clear that every single document produced was valuable to the business.
Reviewing document lifecycles, the firm began to investigate ways to make best use of their collective expertise. Finding limitations with their embedded Practice Management System, and needing to centralise content stored on a variety of different drives, the firm began looking for a Document Management System. Drawn to iManage’s market-leading functionality, ‘best-of-breed’ integrations and PMS links, the firm searched for an implementation partner, selecting Tiger Eye for the project.
As Gillespie Macandrew’s project lead Christopher O’Brien noted, “in the end what led us to choose Tiger Eye wasn’t just their depth of iManage experience, but meeting the team. Being able to have honest and frank conversations helped us to understand the breadth of expertise brought to the project. It gave us confidence that we would work well together.”
Tiger Eye co-ordinated initial user workshops to help GM understand workspace designs and document types, before customising the firm’s own workspace structure for their users.
Following this, the two teams worked collaboratively in the gathering of requirements, training needs, rollout plans and more. Tiger Eye then formulated a bespoke project plan, moving the firm first to an on-premise iManage solution, and then to a Cloud-hosted system, to suit the firm’s needs, with iManage Share, Security Policy Manager and Threat Manager also adopted. All client and matter documents and communications were migrated into iManage, with over 5 million documents involved in the process. Retaining the firm’s existing PMS, an auto-import solution was implemented to ensure that all future work produced in the PMS would migrate over to the firm’s central iManage store.
Ensuring that the iManage platform was fully integrated into the workflows of end users, Tiger Eye connected the firm’s iManage solution with a variety of tools used by the firm’s various departments, in order to maximise efficiency. Pilot training then went ahead. With every step of the implementation journey, Tiger Eye worked alongside GM to ensure all end users were up-to-date with project progress. As O’Brien noted, “even in the early stages, we made sure to offer our staff ‘previews’ of what was in store. We really tried to take it to their side and ask how every element of the iManage system made their lives easier”.
As O’Brien commented, “one of the best things about the iManage Cloud for me is the continual feature release. For the three months we have been in the Cloud, we have already had three product updates, for which we previously would have had to schedule downtime. Now, it’s all getting managed by iManage themselves. That would take a lot of planning and work for us to do in an onpremise system.” Commenting on the project as a whole, he noted “I think there’s been a paradigm shift in what people are able to do with documents. For example, beforehand we didn’t have document preview and we didn’t have very good search components. I think a lot of these things are just taken for granted now, but they really empower people to be able to find the right document and have confidence that it’s stored correctly.”
Gillespie Macandrew is a leading Scottish law firm providing legal services to businesses, individuals and their families. The firm’s clients include individuals, landowners, SMEs and large corporate clients and a key focus is to develop innovative solutions to delivering their advice, tailored to every clients’ needs.
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