Blank Rome embraces cloud strategy for connection, collaboration, and innovation

Blank Rome is a large law firm that retains the agility and ethos of a startup. They’ve been iManage customers for decades, and the platform provides a central place for connection and collaboration underpinning the firm’s unique culture. Blank Rome made the decision to move from on-premises to iManage Cloud to lay the best foundation for innovation, and — with support from iManage partner Kraft Kennedy and a great user training program — the cutover process was seamless, taking place over a weekend. The firm’s 1,250 users have embraced cloud-based enhancements like co-authoring and accessing documents on mobile devices. Moving to the cloud also reduced IT overheads and gave the IT team more time to focus on other new innovations, like AI. 

What started in 1946 as two lawyers practicing together in one city has grown into an Am Law 100 firm with more than 750 attorneys working collaboratively to serve clients in 16 offices across the United States and internationally. Blank Rome applies knowledge, experience, and vision at the highest levels to the service of their clients, colleagues, and communities.

The business challenge

Pave the way for innovation by moving to the cloud

Blank Rome is a large firm with a small firm culture. It’s very collaborative, knows its clients well, and everyone goes out of their way to collaborate and support one another.

A significant factor making this possible, according to Frank Spadafino, Chief Information Officer at Blank Rome, is that everyone stays connected using the iManage document management system and collaboration tools. “We can work from anywhere, so we really appreciate our time in the office, visiting clients, and working with other firms,” he explains. “We’re very open-minded about technology and innovation. We’re always looking at how we can best support clients and colleagues so they can focus on knowledge work and build meaningful relationships.”

Blank Rome decided the best way to support innovation was to migrate its enterprise applications to the cloud. Firm leaders and the technology committee fully backed this strategy to ensure their attorneys would have best-in-class applications and flexible access to support their productivity and well being. 

“The best apps are in the cloud. It’s also where all the innovation around artificial intelligence (AI) is happening,” Spadafino says. “From an IT perspective, my team can innovate faster in the cloud, and if we’re not patching and updating servers, we have more time to focus on the employee experience.”

The solution

Move 50 million documents to a best-of-breed cloud platform

Blank Rome has been using iManage successfully since 1999 and saw no reason to switch. “I’ve used iManage throughout my career, and it’s been exciting to see it develop. When you’re already on the best-of-breed platform, why disrupt users by moving to a lesser system?” asks Spadafino. “We recognized the power of the iManage Cloud immediately.”

The firm upgraded to iManage Work 10 a year before moving to the cloud to ensure that users were comfortable with the interface before making the switch. Then they worked with the iManage Success & Services team to promote user education and adoption, running a comprehensive training program that ensured the cloud transition would be a success.

Blank Rome partnered with Kraft Kennedy to migrate the firm’s 50 million documents to iManage Cloud. They connected workplace apps such as the Microsoft Office suite, and plan to integrate Microsoft Teams so colleagues can maintain iManage governance and security when collaborating on documents with clients and with each other.

"The project went very smoothly,” recalls Spadafino. “Cutover happened over a weekend. iManage is very intuitive, so our colleagues had no problem working in the cloud environment when we went live.”

About 750 attorneys and 500 business professionals securely store client documents and the firm’s operational files in the iManage Cloud. The IT team set up workspaces for each business operations department with the appropriate level of security to balance competing needs for confidentiality and collaboration. The teams in these departments use iManage Work 10 almost exclusively for their day-to-day work. 

“The iManage Cloud has many useful features. We love co-authoring and having the ability to access documents from our mobile devices,” Spadafino comments. 

The firm’s specialist teams also take advantage of additional platform functionality. The transactional practice uses iManage Closing Folders extensively to automate transaction checklists, workflows, and signatures, as well as view project status and quickly identify next steps. Spending less time on administrative tasks makes deal closings more efficient while reducing risk. Best of all, Closing Folders is integrated with iManage Work, ensuring a single source of truth for their final documents.

Meanwhile, the security, risk, and compliance team relies on iManage Threat Manager to monitor the secure environment and alert IT to anomalous user behavior. To round off the firm-wide deployment, the information governance and records teams use iManage Records Manager to keep the firm’s physical records in order.