Harry Elias Partnership streamlines document management to maximize productivity and foster innovation

Founded in 1988 by the late Mr. Harry Elias, Senior Counsel, Harry Elias Partnership LLP has established itself as one of Singapore’s leading full-service law firms with a rich history in the development of Singapore landscape.

When growing volumes of data and a lack of version control capabilities drove the firm to find a solution, they turned to the global leader in document management, rolling out iManage Work in the Cloud for about 100 staff. The benefits are significant. Practice groups can better organize their files and the firm’s lawyers have recouped close to an hour a day in productivity while increasing their billable hours.

The business challenge

Shared storage lacks version control and document management capabilities

Harry Elias Partnership has been in practice for nearly four decades, and that’s a lot of data. As they grow, they are constantly finding ways to improve the quality of their services and response time for clients.

Early on, the team was very old school. Processes were paper-intensive. The systems they used were not connected and, as a result, the firm did a lot of repetitive work.

“One of our key priorities was to integrate workflows, digitize, and use automation to make our processes more efficient,” says Tan Tien Wei, a Partner from the Corporate and Financial Services Practice at Harry Elias. “We implemented an all-in-one solution to make our information more accessible all in one place, boosting productivity whilst adapting to clients’ expectations.”

That worked out for a while, but the ability to share large files securely with clients, and for lawyers to have access anywhere, became a challenge that they needed to solve. So they started to use their on-premises shared storage for this purpose. But, while it is convenient, such a shared storage system is not ideal for version control; Harry Elias staff had to save each new version of a draft as a separate document. This solved one pain point only to create a new one.

“We were generating a huge volume of data, and our internal storage spaces were getting cluttered,” explains Mr. Tan. When lawyers had to work outside the office, they had to use a VPN connection to access the office network and resources, which was cumbersome and unstable. “We decided to look for a knowledge work platform to simplify document management, increase efficiency, and improve version control.”

“That’s how the management came to its decision to adopt a dedicated document management solution and knowledge work platform,” says Mr. Tan. “That’s how we came to iManage.”

The solution

Integrated solutions create a more productive workspace

Harry Elias Partnership wanted a knowledge work platform that would integrate well with Microsoft Office, and it did not take long for the team to settle on iManage in the Cloud. Mr. Tan explains: “iManage is the leading knowledge management platform in Singapore and across the world — why go anywhere else?”

The firm migrated about 3.4 million documents and emails to iManage Work 10 in just six months. The Microsoft 365 integration comes with Copilot, which acts as a virtual assistant for lawyers. Copilot allows attorneys to search and summarize documents within the database without compromising the security and confidentiality of the documents. The ability of iManage to integrate with Microsoft Office applications enhances the efficiency of team members, as Outlook emails and attachments are now automatically saved in iManage and are securely stored and easily accessible. Users may easily drag and drop emails directly from Outlook into the appropriate iManage folders.

With their data migrated to iManage in the Cloud, Harry Elias Partnership’s lawyers can access resources from anywhere over the internet, utilizing multi-factor authentication and authorization mechanisms for security and enhancing the quality of hybrid working arrangements of the firm.

Accelerating adoption with peer-to-peer learning

The Corporate and Financial Services Practice team was onboarded first. As the platform was adopted by other departments, the team educated their peers on how to save documents and navigate the workspace. Using internal champions boosted user adoption, which is at 88 percent and increasing steadily.

“We have around 100 active users including support staff and solicitors,” says Mr. Tan. “Support staff assist in drafting administrative letters in iManage and help to save client documents to free up the legal team for more complex knowledge work.”

The lawyers at Harry Elias track, save, and share document links in iManage Work, storing files quickly and using version control for greater visibility of who opened, saved, and edited each document. Secure Send is used to safely share large files with clients, which would otherwise not have been possible with zipped files.

In addition, individual practice groups have the flexibility to standardize their document policies, naming conventions, and subfolder structures according to group preferences on the iManage platform.