Dutch law firm’s 20+ million documents are secure, organized, and accessible in iManage Cloud

CMS in the Netherlands has been happily using iManage for decades. iManage helps CMS in the Netherlands with secure document management to safely work on any matter.

CMS is one of the largest law firms in the world with over 90 offices in over 50 countries. Having served clients in Amsterdam for more than a century, the Dutch member firm combines its deep knowledge of the Dutch market with a global reach and perspective.

The business challenge

Of the three core platforms CMS in the Netherlands runs on, the document management system (DMS) has the greatest impact on employees.

Chanelfa Verwijk, Functional Application Manager, is responsible for the firm’s DMS. She is one of two employees dedicated to driving continuous improvement and giving knowledge workers a seamless digital experience.

Her mission is to find the best technologies for CMS in the Netherlands and guide colleagues toward the most promising features for making their workday more productive.

“We need document management to be user friendly and tailored to support productivity,” explains Verwijk. “In real terms, that means integrating with apps such as Microsoft Teams so we are not switching between screens and automating tasks that slow us down, like manual file saving.”

Co-authoring is another desirable feature that would make it easier for teams to collaborate on one document in real time. That capability is only available in the cloud, and the law firm’s DMS was still on premises. Moving document management away from on-premises and off physical servers made perfect sense as part of the wider cloud strategy for the firm.

The solution

CMS in the Netherlands has happily been using iManage for decades, while regularly scanning the market to make sure it is still the right fit. “We have been using iManage for 20 years, and that speaks for itself,” she remarks. “iManage is just very easy to use.”

The iManage platform and its popularity with employees have stood the test of time, but Verwijk also values her close relationship with iManage and the firm’s implementation partner, IRIS Nederland. When CMS in the Netherlands migrated to the cloud, the three teams worked together as one to make the transition as smooth as possible.

They migrated 20 years of legal knowledge — 21.9 million documents — from iManage on-premises to the iManage Cloud over a weekend. The transition included integrating the financial system, Litera, Adobe Acrobat, and Microsoft 365. The firm’s employees knew what to expect and easily took to the cloud environment. “Our users include lawyers, notaries, tax advisors, compliance officials, and personal assistants, and only very few of them required initial support after the migration,” says Verwijk.

Employees rely on iManage Work 10 to keep their documents and emails in order, using the “Quick File” button to save them directly from Outlook and “Favorites” to jump to their most-used documents.

The powerful search in Work makes it easy for staff to pinpoint exactly what they are looking for, even if they do not know which folder the document is saved in. When they want to share a document, they can collaborate with iManage Share or use “Secure Send” to create a link for clients. And the iManage integration with Teams enables staff to join meetings without even exiting their workspace.

CMS in the Netherlands monitors DMS user activity with iManage Threat Manager, which alerts the relevant team if someone does something out of the ordinary. They can investigate any anomalous behavior promptly to make sure firm data stays exactly where it belongs — under iManage and CMS in the Netherlands’ protection.