Customer Stories
Foley Hoag moves millions of documents to iManage Cloud
US law firm completes its cloud migration, laying the foundation for a future guided by artificial intelligence
Foley Hoag, a leading law firm with offices in Boston, New York City, Paris, Denver, and Washington D.C., was an on-premises iManage customer for roughly a decade before its recent migration to the iManage Cloud. The move helped modernize the firm’s infrastructure, strengthen its data governance, and unlock new capabilities, and the cutover happened in a single weekend. Foley Hoag’s valuable content is now easily accessible and traceable on a single, governed cloud platform that supports connections with the artificial intelligence (AI) tools the firm is starting to evaluate. The firm initiated a company-wide adoption push to ensure everyone was taking advantage of their newly expanded access. The move also presented an opportunity to eliminate redundant disaster-recovery costs and position IT to focus on AI readiness.
Headquarters
Boston, US
Industry
Legal
Products
iManage Security Policy Manager
Benefits
Stronger data governance
Lower storage costs
Better disaster recovery
AI-ready infrastructure
The business challenge
Modernize infrastructure, strengthen governance, and unlock new capabilities
For a law firm, documents are not just files. They are the firm’s institutional memory — every precedent, every decision, every matter built up over years of work. Prior to its adoption of the iManage platform a decade ago, Foley Hoag had accumulated knowledge across an expanding range of locations: network shares, email folders, SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, and local drives. Duplicate documents multiplied, and the question of how many versions of any given document existed across the estate had no reliable answer. By implementing the iManage platform, they ensured that there was a single place to find the authoritative version of anything.
“If we didn’t have iManage, documents would be stored in multiple silos, multiple locations,” Ada Mak, Director of Applications and Systems at Foley Hoag explains. “We would not have a single point of truth.”
But, as the firm extended its document security and access controls to email, messaging, and other forms of collaboration across platforms, the regulatory obligations grew more complex. Leadership recognized that moving to the iManage Cloud was the right next step for the firm. They could modernize the firm’s infrastructure, strengthen its data governance, and unlock new capabilities that position Foley Hoag for continued success.
“We knew going to the cloud would allow us to focus our resources and talent on achieving better modernization, such as AI, better workflow, and better integration with other applications and platforms. It was the way to go.”
Moving to the cloud would allow us to focus our resources and talent on achieving better modernization, such as AI, better workflow, and better integration with other applications and platforms. We knew it was the way to go.
Ada Mak, Director of Applications and Systems, Foley Hoag
The solution
Going to iManage Cloud is the prerequisite to modernization
Having been an iManage customer for a decade, the Foley Hoag IT team had confidence in its relationship with both the platform and the people behind it. Leadership saw the migration as both a strategic move and a technical upgrade: a way to modernize infrastructure, improve disaster recovery, and free IT resources to focus on higher-value work.
“Going to iManage Cloud is the first step into the future, because everything will likely stop developing on legacy systems,” says Mak. “This is the prerequisite to modernization.”
The firm worked with practice groups to redesign folder structures, ensuring that the content migrating to the cloud would be better organized — and more useful — than before. Training sessions were reframed not as routine onboarding but as a firm-wide reintroduction to the value of a document management platform. They explained why categorization matters, how standardized storage is an investment in the firm’s collective knowledge, and what made the move worth the effort.
The cutover to go-live took a single weekend. The system went down on Friday evening and was live again by Sunday, with millions of documents moved to the cloud. The firm deployed iManage Security Policy Manager and iManage Threat Manager alongside iManage Work in the Cloud, bringing Foley Hoag’s capabilities for building ethical walls and monitoring threats up to date with the platform’s latest versions.
“It is very important for our content to be governed within iManage,” says Mak. “Security has to be applied. It is critical. The documents should be categorized properly so that the AI platform can identify the contents in a much better and more detailed way.”
700
users
10 years
with iManage
1 weekend
to go-live
The business outcomes
The iManage platform secures the proprietary knowledge of the firm
Greater freedom of access was the most immediate change. Content was now in the cloud, more searchable than ever, and available from anywhere. “Having more granular search capabilities in iManage puts knowledge at the attorneys’ fingertips,” says Mak. “Previously, if a search came up empty, associates might have to ask a partner, or find someone else who had worked on the documents.”
The move to iManage Cloud also presented the firm with an opportunity to modernize its disaster recovery approach. With iManage managing redundancy across multiple data centers, Foley Hoag no longer needs to maintain a secondary data center. What had previously been a significant storage investment became redundant.
“The iManage platform is not just holding our documents,” remarks Mak. “It is securing the proprietary knowledge of the firm, our bread and butter.”
Central to how the firm protects its most sensitive content, Mak says “iManage Security Policy Manager is vital to maintaining secure document management. It allows us to automate the workflow from the intake to the closure of the matter.”
This gives the Risk & Compliance team a structured, auditable workflow in place of the previously followed manual procedures. Access control, version control, and history tracing are built into every matter. When a case closes, the firm can open those records with confidence, knowing exactly who accessed what and when.
The firm’s security team extends that protection into day-to-day operations by using Threat Manager to proactively monitor content workflows. They track how documents move across practice groups, identify patterns that signal a workflow gap, and generate the activity evidence required for ISO certification.
“During ISO certification, we have to produce evidence of how we monitor and detect activities. iManage Threat Manager gives us that evidence,” notes Mak.
Looking ahead
Foley Hoag is actively evaluating how to connect AI tools to the iManage knowledge platform using the iManage MCP Server, which would increase the value of its iManage investment.
“We’re very interested in evaluating iManage MCP Server and using it as a bridge between AI tools and iManage. Very excited to look at what MCP can do.”
