Secure access and ease of collaboration are a winning combo for Arizona law firm

Owned and operated for more than 40 years by a team of 90 dedicated professionals in Phoenix, Gammage & Burnham's reach extends to all corners of Arizona, throughout the United States, with connections and experience as deep as their roots. The firm’s top priority is helping its clients identify and achieve their goals, which demands a unique mix of intelligence, creativity, and hard work in each engagement. In line with their commitment to giving clients the best value possible, Gammage & Burnham have been iManage customers for more than 24 years.

The business challenge

Where collaboration meets security

Gammage & Burnham’s ability to productively engage with their clients relies on technologies that provide secure access. Many firms still rely on solutions like shared drives, but these don’t meet the firm’s requirement for effective collaboration and secure sharing of their documents, emails, and other communications. Hernlund says that the longer those methods are used, the higher their potential to introduce unacceptable risks to firm and client data. 

With iManage, the legal team can audit access to a document, ensure it has the proper security settings, and, if appropriate, prevent specific parties from accessing the information. But, while iManage ensures that documents are protected, it also makes them more accessible.

The solution

"Saved us a ton of money"

Gammage & Burnham have stayed with iManage for more than 20 years because Hernlund hasn’t seen anything that would prompt him to consider a change.

“Based on what I’ve seen of competing products from the onboarding we’ve done and from talking with new attorneys who join the firm, I don’t see any compelling reason to switch,” he explains. “There’s just no real competition out there for iManage.”

Hernlund says iManage is on the right track when it comes to helping the firm further its technology goals. Between what he’s seen in the past, and where he knows iManage is headed according to the product development roadmap they share with customers, he believes the company will continue to build its platform and refine its offering to provide strong value and good ROI.

“Because iManage scales so well, it can be the right solution for a firm that has five attorneys or a firm that has 500,” says Hernlund. “We’ve never really looked at going anywhere else.”

One of the features Hernlund appreciates most is that iManage provides customers with a universal API so they can save money by developing their own apps.

“The universal API has enabled us to develop tools in-house rather than having to buy expensive third-party solutions we might use only rarely,” says Hernlund. “By using the universal API and PowerShell, we can onboard more than a million documents at a time in less than 24 hours. It’s saved us a ton of money.”

iMCommunity helps us generate new ideas

Active in the iManage Community, Hernlund finds it particularly helpful to see what other organizations are doing and is often able to generate new ideas based on their feedback.

“I find iMCommunity pretty useful, and I’m sure others do as well,” he says. “I contribute a lot of code snippets myself.”

The firm also makes good use of the iManage Help Center and the documentation iManage provides.

Business outcomes

iManage makes using the system easier every day

The firm is more productive with iManage Work 10 in the Cloud because everything goes into one easy location that everyone has access to. The firm’s professionals find it very useful to be able to see both the content and the history of the documents. And iManage Share allows users to send large volumes of content offsite and collaborate more easily with external parties.

Gammage & Burnham uses iManage Security Policy Manager to build ethical walls that keep parties separate when that’s deemed necessary. Security Policy Manager helps firms reduce the risk of data exposure by segmenting knowledge work based on confidentiality requirements and enforcing need-to-know access for select staff.

The firm also implemented iManage Threat Manager to alert the team when unusual and potentially unauthorized or malicious activity occurs in the system. For example, if the team sees in Threat Manager that somebody is downloading a lot of content and that behavior isn’t normal for the individual in question, they can promptly investigate and, if warranted, the firm can take immediate action on the information. This helps them keep critical knowledge and client data safe, but it may also save the firm from a costly or reputationally risky situation. Threat Manager delivers usage analytics to address regulatory compliance and information governance needs, as well.

Hernlund says iManage makes onboarding, training, and using the system easier every day.
 
“We’re at 100 percent adoption,” he confirms. “iManage allows us to quickly onboard new hires and train them in just a couple of hours, and they can self-teach beyond that.”