Acevedo Belt delivers big firm quality with boutique efficiency using iManage Work

Acevedo Belt is proving that boutique firms with the right expertise and technology can produce results that rival those of larger practices. The firm’s five seasoned attorneys often sit across the table from the big firms — combining decades of big law experience with a sophisticated tech stack that enhances its legal work, makes institutional knowledge easily accessible to all team members, and manages complex matters effectively. A document management system (DMS) that enables efficient workflows and sophisticated integrations is foundational to the firm's tech ecosystem. But over time, the firm found that NetDocuments, its DMS, was no longer keeping pace with the broader innovation happening across the legal technology landscape. This constrained efficiencies as the firm grew. After a thorough evaluation of the market options, Acevedo Belt made the transition to iManage Work 10 in the Cloud. The migration and implementation were a resounding success, with 100 percent firm-wide acceptance and adoption, and immediate efficiency gains.

Boutique transactional law firm Acevedo Belt was founded in 2017 on a different model for delivering legal services: senior large-firm-trained attorneys empowered by advanced legal technology rather than large teams. The Miami-based firm represents clients in Florida, across the US, and internationally in the corporate, hospitality, real estate, international, and family office areas. Acevedo Belt relies solely on highly experienced practitioners, leveraging experience and technology over headcount to scale its practice.

The business challenge

Supporting the infrastructure behind a modern legal tech stack

Acevedo Belt’s operating model depends heavily on software tools and technology to elevate productivity while delivering sophisticated legal work and services. Cutting-edge legal tech enables the firm to perform routine tasks more efficiently, freeing attorneys to do more complex work that requires their deep experience. This approach relies heavily on the performance of their technology stack for consistent, high-quality delivery.

The DMS is therefore critical to their success. It must provide robust version control, support seamless integrations, and serve as a reliable single source of truth, or it undermines the strategy. As Acevedo Belt adopted new tools for legal analysis, document search, and transaction management, it became clear that its DMS needed to serve as a stronger, more robust foundation for the firm’s increasingly powerful tech stack, and it just wasn’t keeping pace.

"We are leveraging technology to the maximum extent. If our DMS fails to deliver, it's a big problem," says Belt.

Document versioning and search results were a particular pain point. "When we searched in our previous DMS, it only provided the most recent version," Belt says, “and that limited visibility slowed things down, introducing inefficient manual workarounds and unnecessary risk.”

This limitation of their prior platform became increasingly problematic as the firm’s case volume grew. Acevedo Belt handles complex transactional work where precise version control and full transparency of a document’s evolution are essential. Attorneys must have complete confidence that a search has turned up everything they need to see.

The solution

Selecting iManage as the foundation of the firm’s technology ecosystem

Belt carefully considered the decision to change document management systems. He discovered that iManage is widely regarded as the market leader and already knew that their closest competitor was not fully meeting the firm’s expanding needs. He set out to gather deeper insight into iManage while also identifying any other credible contenders. His evaluation included a detailed comparison of uptime performance, innovation roadmaps, user experience, and overall platform.

Based on this assessment, Belt concluded that iManage was the best option to support the firm moving forward.

"The iManage roadmap, pace of innovation, uptime, and resiliency were persuasive,” Belt recalls. "and so was its track record for following through.”

Acevedo Belt implemented iManage Work as its core DMS platform and transferred the firm’s entire document archive seamlessly to the iManage Cloud. The firm is using iManage Threat Manager to enhance its security posture with continuous monitoring of platform activity. iManage Share enables their attorneys to give clients and other parties secure, governed, and user-friendly access to relevant documents.

The platform's integration capabilities proved equally important, enabling the firm to connect iManage with multiple tools used across the firm, including Harvey AI, DeepJudge, Clio, Microsoft, and Docusign. Several features of the Work DMS immediately demonstrated their value through increased efficiency. The Microsoft Outlook integration was especially impactful.

"The fact that your workspace panel appears in Microsoft Outlook so you're not constantly flipping back and forth, and you have the ability to drag and drop documents and emails into iManage from Outlook; that's a huge benefit," says Belt.

Importantly, the platform’s version control capabilities now enable easy access to a document’s entire history and evolution, which resolved a major pain point of the firm’s previous system. In addition, Belt says “Bundle Builder,” another time-saving Work feature, enables users to combine multiple documents into single PDF packages. This helps the team significantly with document assembly.