Ashurst has relied on iManage as its document management system for over 20 years. In that time, the firm had accumulated more than 200 million documents across client matters spanning hundreds of thousands of former and current clients, prior to the start of its destruction program. That data must be governed, retained, and ultimately destroyed in strict accordance with the firm’s regulatory obligations and client commitments. Ashurst were on their global cloud journey as plans to merge with Perkins Coie developed. Perkins Coie were already in the iManage cloud, and consolidating the two environments was a natural step. Client attitudes toward the cloud had shifted; the barrier to moving had been removed, and both firms shared the same document management system and the same philosophy: the DMS is the source of truth, and everything else is transitory. The result is full version control, access controls, auditing, and reporting that let Ashurst Perkins Coie demonstrate compliance to clients.

Headquarters

London, Uk

Industry

Legal

Products

iManage Work 10 in the Cloud

iManage Cloud

iManage Threat Manager

Benefits

  • Global information governance

  • Single source of truth in cloud

  • Data protection and audit trail

  • Simplified retention management

The business challenge

Applying one set of standards to a global information estate

Information governance at a global law firm is not one distinct problem to solve. Dozens of overlapping issues — different jurisdictions, different regulatory regimes, different retention requirements, different client expectations — all sit on top of a single, shared obligation to protect client data and provide proof of that protection to anyone who asks.

“The sheer volume means we have to have a very robust document management system — governed by the access controls, versioning, audit trails, and retention policies that the firm’s regulatory obligations and client commitments demand,” says Suzie Reed, Information Governance Officer at Ashurst Perkins Coie.

She adds that each global region carries its own regulatory requirements — some requiring shorter retention windows, others significantly longer. Managing that complexity across offices and on-premises instances deployed region by region over two decades, at scale, became a significant operational challenge.

And Reed says that scale isn’t hypothetical. “Trying to manage over 200 million documents in SharePoint, OneDrive, or local repositories would be virtually impossible.”

"It's not enough to just say it. You have to prove that you are able to control that data. iManage has the version control, the access controls, the auditing, and the reporting we need."

Suzie Reed, Information Governance Officer, Ashurst Perkins Coie

The solution

Same platform, same document management philosophy

Consolidating on a single cloud environment became the clear path forward. Whereas past client attitudes constrained Ashurst from moving to the cloud, those attitudes had shifted. For Ashurst Perkins Coie, joining forces in the cloud is a practical extension of a common way of working. The firms share the same platform and the same document management philosophy.

“Since both firms use iManage, we will be joining our instances together,” Reed said at the time. “That will make life a lot easier. Our lawyers think the same way, they work the same way, and our firms follow the same policies. Our source of truth is and will remain our document management system, which is iManage Work.”

The consolidation process involves rationalizing multiple on-premises instances covering Australia, the US, the Middle East, and other regions into a single cloud environment. As part of that work, Ashurst Perkins Coie is redeveloping its folder structures and document types to give lawyers a consistent, searchable way to work across the combined firm’s estate.

With the move to iManage Cloud, they gain co-authoring capabilities and expanded search across consolidated instances — resolving one of the firm’s most pressing operational needs.

The firm conducts live audits with clients, walking them through how documents are saved, tracked, and controlled within the system. iManage Threat Manager, with its monitoring and reporting capabilities, is part of Ashurst Perkins Coie’s data loss prevention approach.

“It’s not enough to just say it,” Reed notes. “You have to prove that you are able to control that data. iManage Work in the Cloud has the version control, the access controls, the auditing, and the reporting we need.”

200 M

documents

20+ years

with iManage

4,000+

users

The business outcomes

A foundation for the merged firms to operate as one

With the move to iManage Cloud, the firm is reducing search friction for lawyers, simplifying the application of retention policies across jurisdictions, and providing a foundation for the merged firms of Ashurst Perkins Coie to operate as one. Enabling our lawyers to serve clients across the globe, seamlessly and securely, is a winning outcome.

Reed says Ashurst Perkins Coie doesn’t measure the value of iManage by just one metric. It is demonstrated in the firm’s ability to make and keep commitments to clients — commitments around how their data is stored, how it is protected, how long it is kept, and how it is destroyed. That means iManage versioning and audit-trail capabilities are an active component of client pitches.

The firm retains content for 10 years, as their clients agreed. “iManage provides the structure — defensible, auditable, demonstrable — that makes our process possible. If a firm said it would retain 10 years of content, and the client learned that 15 or 20 years’ worth was at risk of exposure, a client would find that hard to accept,” says Reed.

Looking ahead

For Reed, the cloud migration isn’t the end state — it’s the foundation for the next phase of information governance at Ashurst Perkins Coie. “The next generation platform changes with iManage are very exciting,” says Reed. “The ability to bring all of our instances together for an enhanced search experience, and to give us a consistent framework — that’s going to be a significant improvement.”

Chief among her priorities: automatic metadata tagging. Today, tagging is manual. Documents are filed into folders with predefined document types, and the system works only if lawyers file things in the right place — which, as Reed acknowledges, doesn’t always happen.

“I think of iManage as a house with lots of rooms,” she says. “You wouldn’t put your shopping away in your bedroom. It’s brilliant that everything’s in iManage, but it needs to be in the right place, because we have different controls on different workspaces.”

Automatic classification changes that equation. Reed sees it surfacing redundant, outdated content that no longer needs to be retained — feeding directly into the destruction and disposition work that sits at the center of Ashurst Perkins Coie’s information governance program. “Once you know what you have, you know what controls you need to apply to it,” she says.

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