Minneapolis law firm Honsa Mara Landry works smarter with iManage Work 10

Based in Minneapolis, Honsa Mara Landry (formerly Honsa Rodd Landry) is a law firm focused exclusively on family law. Formed in 2017 by three Minnesota attorneys with a mix of solo practice, small firm and big firm experience, Honsa Mara Landry has grown to handling all aspects of family law.

The business challenge

Upon founding their own law firm, Honsa Mara Landry had to decide what kind of technology they wanted to employ for document and email management. Previous experience with iManage among one of the founding partners made iManage Work a leading choice.

“Prior to Honsa Mara Landry, I worked at a large law firm that used iManage Work, so I was very familiar with the product,” said Kristy Rodd, Partner, Honsa Mara Landry. “For nearly 10 years, I used iManage Work daily. I knew how valuable it could be and I wanted to make sure that same type of functionality was available at our new firm.”

The solution

Starting a new practice gave Honsa Mara Landry a blank slate from a technology perspective, so they opted to deploy the latest version of the industry-leading document management system, iManage Work 10. A complete rethink of the company's flagship product, based on the input of hundreds of professionals around the globe, iManage Work 10 is designed from the ground up to meet the needs of the modern professional.

Smart features like smart worklists, smart document preview, and document timelines help make professionals more productive. Personalized search focuses on results most relevant to the user, helping them filter out the noise. Meanwhile, email management learns email habits, so it can suggest appropriate filing locations while automatically filing conversations together.

All of this functionality is delivered through a simple and intuitive, mobile-first user experience that allows users to securely work anywhere, at any time, on any device. Deploying the solution via the iManage Cloud, rather than on-premises, further simplified things for Honsa Mara Landry.

“We’re a small firm with limited IT resources,” said Rodd. “Accessing iManage Work 10 through the iManage Cloud takes the IT burden off of us. Also, the intuitive design and user interface mean we don’t have to worry about calls to the help desk. Because it’s so incredibly easy to use, everyone at the firm has adopted it for their daily workflow.”

Business outcomes

Since going live with iManage Work 10, Honsa Mara Landry’s professionals have experienced numerous benefits — from how they search for documents to how they work remotely.

“With iManage Work 10, search is easy and fast — the search box is front and center, like with a consumer website,” said Rodd. “We also like the fact that the system makes it easy to find the files you’re working on with smart worklists and personalized search — that’s a big help.”

Because iManage Work 10 provides a consistent user experience across phones, tablets and desktops, working from home or outside the office is a seamless experience for professionals at Honsa Mara Landry.

“When I work from home, iManage Work 10 looks exactly the same on my home desktop as it does when I log in at the office,” said Rodd. “There’s no difference in the experience— all my files are there, and I can easily work with them with all the same functionality. It’s the same thing if we take laptops or tablets with us to the courtroom or a mediation hearing — we get a consistent user experience and access to all our documents and emails, no matter what device we use. I’ve been at mediations where I needed immediate access to certain documents to complete a mediated agreement that day, and I was able to log into iManage Work 10 on my tablet and grab those documents. I’ve also been in situations where a client needs something, and I can quickly look at iManage Work 10 on my phone and bring it up — that’s something I’ve done a lot, actually.”

Additionally, Honsa Mara Landry has seen a boost in productivity by taking advantage of many smart features built into iManage Work 10 that enable the firm to tackle common tasks more effectively.

“The smart preview function in iManage Work 10 is really neat,” said Rodd. “We can preview a huge document in seconds. And if we’re comparing two documents, iManage Work 10 will open to the same page of a document’s previous version automatically. When we compare documents, the document timelines are great for understanding how a document has evolved to its current point and for quickly seeing whether a document has been edited by someone since the last time you touched it. All of those features are really helpful to us.”

As with many professional services firms, managing emails remains a big part of the day for Honsa Mara Landry’s professionals and iManage Work 10 has provided ways for them to handle that aspect more efficiently as well.

“The auto-filing of emails is great, but what I really like is that filed emails are automatically marked for everyone on the thread — saving duplicative effort,” said Rodd. “There have been several times when we need to clarify whether an important file has been sent or not, and I was able to easily cross-check it based on how we save and file our e-mails in iManage.”

Summing up the experience with Work 10, Rodd said, “We chose iManage to efficiently manage our documents and emails. Now that we have been using iManage Work 10 for several months, it clearly has exceeded our expectations. Choosing iManage Work 10 has been a fantastic decision for us.”