Governance is a powerful differentiator at Chaffetz Lindsey

The solution

Cloud-first, matter-centric, and governed for AI from the ground up

Chaffetz Lindsey worked with Harbor Global as its migration partner, moving 2.5 million documents to the cloud with no errors or issues. And what the migration unlocked — complete visibility into the platform — mattered as much as the migration itself. “I instituted matter-centricity, and there were no deviations from that,” Gibson says.

iManage Security Policy Manager resolved the ethical walls challenge and created something more valuable: a governance architecture that scales automatically. New matters added to a screened client inherit the parent’s security rights without manual intervention. The arbitration panel model — in which a partner must be completely separated from all colleagues on relevant matters — now runs as routine rather than an emergency procedure.

“I manage it now with very, very little effort. That’s a godsend. And Security Policy Manager is that much more efficient in the cloud than it is in the on-prem environment,” Gibson explains, “both financially and operationally.”

The culture became self-reinforcing. “A summer associate who chose not to file a memo returned a year later and asked for it back. The document no longer existed. He learned the hard way that you do have to file it to get it back for recall,” says Gibson. That intern became one of the firm’s best filers. The firm’s timekeepers and staff are believers, as well, with 100 percent adoption of the iManage platform. “No Chaffetz Lindsey content is shoveled into OneDrive, and there are no shadow repositories,” he confirms.

Fortuitously, starting clean with iManage and establishing a governance layer that protected clients for nearly two decades also turned out to be the prerequisite for AI. The firm deployed Ask iManage, an AI assistant that operates within the iManage platform, within a two-month window, and did not need to stage the rollout or segment it by practice group.

Ask iManage transformed how the firm finds and uses knowledge. Search is more than half of what people do in the platform, and Ask iManage made that faster and more precise than ever — letting attorneys and staff find specific clauses in signed engagement letters, compare how similar matters were handled, and get a new team member up to speed on an active trial in days rather than weeks. Without it, that same team member might be reading thousands of documents — and causing alerts about anomalous user activity from iManage Threat Manager to stack up on Gibson’s desktop as they worked through the pile.

The real-time visibility into document access and download activity that Threat Manager provides is the iManage capability Gibson relies on most heavily when attorneys exit the firm. It ensures that risky patterns surface before they become problems and reinforces the governance discipline that underpins the firm’s client audit responses.