Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg optimise productivity by streamlining attorney workflow
About the firm
Neal, Gerber, & Eisenberg, founded in 1986, is a Chicago-based law firm whose attorneys share a culture of teamwork and devotion to personalized client service to advance our clients’ business interests. Our attorneys provide legal business solutions to public and private entities of all types – including Fortune 100 companies, financial institutions, nonprofits and high net worth individuals – in connection with domestic and global business transactions and litigation. Our full-service firm is large enough to handle nearly any legal matter throughout the world, yet small enough that clients personally know the attorneys accountable to their matters.
Challenges
As part of a technology refresh and update, Clint Kehoe, Director of IT at Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg (NGE), and his team began systematically upgrading the firm’s various business applications with compatibility and scalability in mind. The group sought out feedback from end-user attorneys and evaluated how to streamline their processes to increase efficiency and productivity. Attorneys were spending a significant amount of time moving a large amount of content manually between their iManage Work DMS and HighQ Collaborate in order to share databases or links to documents externally with their clients. Each practice has at least two data rooms in HighQ, making manually shifting documents a cumbersome task. When matters were closed, all of that content needed to be moved back to iManage for archiving. Often, the data did not get moved out of HighQ, or IT would end up moving the data back to iManage.
Solution
Phoenix Business Solutions, a premier iManage reseller was brought in to consult on the project. They recommended implementing SeeUnity’s Echo Content Synchronization (Echo) product for its scalability and to address the workflow inefficiencies with secure integration of systems. With Echo in place, attorneys could utilize a convenient right-click feature from within iManage to publish content to HighQ. Echo rules were set up to detect any changes made to specific documents in iManage or HighQ and sync the data automatically. Since attorney’s preferred to have control and discretion over which content and changes from their clients would be synced back to iManage from HighQ, a user sync function was configured for that purpose. When matters close, attorneys simply use Echo to sync all of the content and metadata back to iManage for archiving.
NGE did consider building their own solution, however they would lack support with version changes and long-term planning called for extending to the iManage Cloud. Because Echo is compatible with on-premise, hybrid, or cloud applications the shift would be seamless and less disruptive to productivity.
Benefits
With the Echo integration of NGE’s technologies in place for nearly a year, users report great satisfaction with time savings, convenience, and an increase in productivity. Tedious manual processes have been replaced with an automated sync, while attorneys retain the option to decide which client documents get synced back to the DMS. IT is pleased with improved Information Governance (IG), as documents are consistently being properly stored in the iManage DMS. And more importantly, the foundation is now laid for future growth and scalability because the Echo product is built upon native API’s and leverages iManage libraries to connect to many reporitories.
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