Liberty Mutual modernizes knowledge management with iManage in the Cloud

When Liberty Mutual’s legal organization wanted to accelerate its cloud strategy for knowledge management, they partnered with iManage and partner Fireman and Company. The first step was upgrading to iManage Work 10 and rolling out iManage Threat Manager to create a digital workspace as seamless and transparent as the traditional office experience. In addition to reducing costs and management overhead for more than 100 retired servers, Liberty Mutual has enabled its users to collaborate from anywhere with secure access to mission-critical documents through the iManage cloud platform—a necessity for a global team.

Liberty Mutual is the sixth largest property and casualty insurer in the world, operating across 29 countries and employing more than 45,000 people. Their purpose is to help people embrace today, and confidently pursue tomorrow. In today’s rapidly evolving landscape, the global legal department looks to solve problems and improve the quality of legal services for Liberty Mutual’s stakeholders; going beyond implementing of new technology to creating a dynamic, responsive environment that inspires better outcomes.

The business challenge

Reducing operational complexity by migrating to cloud

For the corporate legal team, being able to find and share the right documents quickly has a significant impact on productivity and the delivery of legal services. But fast access to data needs to be balanced with meeting security and compliance regulations. The company’s on-premises document storage solution was secure and accessible; however, to be future-ready and agile in the legal department, Liberty Mutual wanted to migrate to the cloud.

“The data center footprint supporting our document management platform was enormous. We were maintaining and patching servers, which was costly to run and took up a huge amount of time for the IT team,” explained Samit Patel, Engineering Manager at Liberty Mutual. “We’d also outgrown our folder creation platform; if it went down, we would delay the day-to-day operations of the legal team.”

In 2020, Liberty Mutual began looking for a new solution with a modern interface and more advanced features. The solution also needed to be able to integrate with other workplace applications to give users a seamless experience from front-line staff through to senior management.

The solution

Upgrading the existing iManage environment

Having assessed the products on the market, Liberty Mutual decided to upgrade their existing iManage solution from on-premises to iManage Work 10 in the Cloud. “Our users were familiar with iManage and we wanted to minimize disruption by giving them a workspace and folder structure they were comfortable with,” said Maggie McVeigh, Product Owner for Legal Knowledge Management at Liberty Mutual. “iManage is easy to integrate with other systems using APIs, so was the best fit for achieving our goals.”

The team partnered with Fireman and Company to execute a complex transition, migrating users to the cloud and shifting from legacy on-premises workflows, while still meeting records and information governance requirements in iManage Records Manager. “The initial implementation took just six weeks, and Liberty Mutual also received support from an iManage Customer Success Engagement Manager to get a better understanding of the cloud infrastructure and the pre-defined tools and programs that take the complexity out of large-scale migrations,” said Patel.

“Our Customer Success Engagement Manager provided advisory guidance for the IT team so we could go on to train and support our business users,” added McVeigh. “The iManage expert advisory guidance both empowers us with in-house knowledge and expertise to manage our environment and gives us access to a dedicated expert to support us on future implementations — such as iManage Share, which we’re rolling out next to simplify collaboration.”

A single source of truth

iManage Work provides a single-source platform for Liberty Mutual’s corporate legal team. Teams have a central, secure resource where they can find all of the information they need to be more productive and collaborate to deliver better outcomes quickly. The latest version of the solution was rolled out while users were working from home due to the pandemic. This helped to recreate the office environment in a digital workspace and enabled the corporate legal team to work smarter and collaborate more effectively.

“Users love the new interface and particularly like the iManage Work Panel in Microsoft Outlook, which helps them find documents faster,” commented McVeigh.“iManage gives the team a central place to collaborate and store documents, which is helpful while working remotely.”

To get more visibility into how the team is using iManage, Liberty Mutual implemented iManage Threat Manager. This provides insight into the features people are using and simplifies measurement to help drive adoption. The reporting capabilities in Threat Manager can also identify areas where additional training may be needed to help people work more efficiently.

Business outcomes

A digital workspace to rival the office experience

By migrating to a high-performing cloud solution, Liberty Mutual has increased,security and reduced the management overhead of maintaining more than 100 servers. This leaves the IT team free to focus less on patching and keeping systems running, and more on strategic initiatives such as enhancing the environment to give users the best possible experience.

The corporate legal team now can find the right documents faster and more easily in the virtual working environment.

“iManage enables the team to spend more time collaborating productively and less time in ‘mail jail’—which is vital for the corporate legal team who handle hundreds of emails a day,” said McVeigh. “And we haven’t even tapped into everything it has to offer. It has evolved to be so much more to us than simply a storage system.”

With a scalable, secure document management platform, Liberty Mutual is well-placed to evolve the technology in line with changing business needs, including supporting its ambitions to expand internationally.

Looking ahead

A comprehensive digital workspace

Liberty Mutual is on a journey to create a seamless digital workspace to help users work smarter and faster, with iManage at its core. As the implementation matures, Liberty Mutual also plans to roll out more processes and policies to make document management more consistent and to simplify matter creation. The team is rolling out iManage Share and plans to explore iManage Drive.

“iManage Drive will allow people to access data securely when they’re offline, and we’re looking to launch iManage Share in early 2022 to simplify sharing content outside of the legal department with other Liberty Mutual stakeholders or external partners,” said Patel. “In the future, we’re interested in how iManage Knowledge Unlocked and exploring artificial intelligence can help the team unleash the full value of their expertise.”