Strong peer accolades lead Harris Advokatfirma to iManage Cloud platform

High volumes of small cases can make document management a challenge for midsize law firms, and finding the right system can make all the difference. When Harris Advokatfirma needed to replace its document management system (DMS), it asked Norway’s leading firms for inspiration. The resounding response was iManage Work 10 in the Cloud. After a seamless migration, the team is more productive than ever, and system reliability has never been better.

Harris Advokatfirma is a full-service law firm based in Norway. Founded more than 100 years ago, it has become one of the largest players in the region. The firm takes pride in giving clients well-rounded, strategic advice to help them make the right decisions.

The business challenge

Resolve DMS reliability issues

When advising clients, Harris Advokatfirma (Harris) asks two questions — is it legal, and is it wise? To steer them in the right direction, its lawyers combine a thorough understanding of the law with in-depth knowledge of the clients’ business. The firm handles a high volume of small cases every year, and its lawyers rely on the DMS to keep case data in one place.

As Harris’s business needs have evolved, they’ve striven to keep the firm’s DMS aligned to those needs. They moved to the cloud first, to reduce costs and free up time spent maintaining servers, then later took stock of how well the system was supporting the firm’s lawyers.

In some of the firm’s early cloud experiences, reports that saved work wasn’t consistently available the next day underscored the importance of reliability in a DMS. Vegard Osa, IT Manager at Harris Advokatfirma, addressed this when evaluating a new solution by ensuring the stability and integrity of their documents was a top priority.

“The DMS is one of the most important platforms for a law firm,” comments Osa. “It needs to be secure, affordable, and highly available, as well as user friendly.” And with one person solely responsible for IT, operational efficiency, and security, he believes it is vital to have a platform that’s reliable and easy to manage.

The solution

A highly available, peer-recommended platform

For solid availability they could rely on, Osa looked for a cloud-native DMS that could guarantee access. But collaboration on live documents was another sticking point. Harris has many clients and cases to work on, and collaboration is key to getting work completed quickly. That’s why co-authoring and Teams integration are also attractive features for the firm’s lawyers.

Osa reached out to leading firms across Norway to learn which DMS they used and whether they were happy with the employee experience. After speaking to four or five large firms, the standout solution was iManage.

“We looked at a few Norwegian solutions. One was based on Microsoft SharePoint, and the other was a custom build. But after seeing a demo with iManage, its usability won us over,” recalls Osa.

For the implementation, Harris worked with specialist transformation partner, PSA Solutions, and migrated around four terabytes of data into iManage Work 10 in the Cloud. The firm’s 70 users became comfortable using the new platform with minimal training. Everyone finds iManage intuitive and straightforward to navigate.

“I was surprised by how easy it was to move to iManage,” says Osa. “Some lawyers aren’t that comfortable with new technologies, but we’ve had no issues at all.”

Osa worked together with PSA Solutions to integrate Microsoft Teams, which gives staff access to iManage features and automatically applies iManage security policies to documents from within the Teams app. They connected the anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC) systems to ensure all relevant documents are
automatically captured in the right client folder. PSA Solutions also helped Harris create custom templates for new document types.

Lawyers, admins, and interns save all documents and emails in iManage Work 10; it is their central repository. “iManage enforces good data governance by prompting lawyers to save emails rather than relying on memory,” Osa adds. “Admin can take a backseat when you’re busy working on cases, so it’s really helpful to have a structured process in place.”

Another area of satisfaction for staff is how quickly they can find relevant documents using iManage search. Previously, staff had to rely on wildcards to get matches, which could be a painstaking process. With iManage search, which is both more thorough and user-friendly, document findability is dramatically improved.

Following the success of iManage Work 10, Harris implemented iManage Threat Manager to apply security policies at scale and to proactively notify Osa if anyone is exporting large volumes of documents. This adds an additional layer of security and means he can react quickly when there is a risk of sensitive data leaving the firm.