Travers Smith achieves transformative results by pivoting to iManage

As we approached the renewal of our existing document management system, Travers Smith began looking for alternatives. We had experienced adoption, product stability, and performance challenges on the current system, and wanted to ensure we followed due diligence. It was clear our incumbent platform’s key competitor was iManage, so we reached out, secured access to a trial, and started an in-depth evaluation process. After six months, we concluded that iManage Work 10 in the Cloud is much more modern and performant, more sophisticated, easier to use, and much more stable than our previous platform. These conclusions tipped the scale in favor of pivoting to the iManage platform.

Travers Smith delivers high-quality, market-leading advice to high profile sophisticated clients. The firm regularly conducts cutting-edge and industry-first work for clients across industry sectors and carved a market-leading reputation for its expertise in International Asset Management, Cross Border Mergers & Acquisitions, and Global Dispute Resolution and Investigations. With offices in London and Paris, and through a carefully cultivated network based on relationships with independent law firms from all over the world, Travers Smith can provide a first-class, seamless service to clients around the globe.

The business challenge

Deciding it’s time for a change

Travers Smith was considering whether to renew our existing DMS platform. Our work demands a high-performing document management solution. We had previously experienced adoption, stability, and performance issues with our previous platform, so we decided it was time to look seriously at alternatives and a competitor platform, which was iManage.

After looking at the other market options, we began working with the iManage team to see if the iManage platform could serve us better. In the six months of due diligence that followed we decided that moving to iManage Work 10 in the Cloud would bring many worthwhile benefits to the firm.

The solution

Seeing incredible value

Since the adoption of iManage, we’ve seen incredible value with features like the ability to drag and drop folders and files into the modern iManage interface and automatically populate fields and folder structure. This has saved a huge amount of time, especially within our disputes practice — a transformative improvement for enterprise document management.

Another significant benefit to the firm after switching to iManage Work 10 in the Cloud is that our lawyers stopped working in shared folders and siloed systems. It is critically important that the firm’s lawyers and business services professionals engage with a document management platform without using alternative systems, so, getting them to put their work only into iManage has been invaluable.

Business outcomes

Achieving adoption

In a law firm, change can be challenging, and it doesn’t happen overnight. For every individual across our firm, we dedicated an hour of one-on-one time to engage with and train on the system. It was important to us that people fully understood why we had migrated from the incumbent platform and had the opportunity to learn more about how to use iManage Work.

Our efforts resulted in significant increases in daily active usage and monthly active usage of the iManage Cloud platform. I'm pleased to say we achieved about 90 percent of monthly active usage and that usage has remained at about 90 percent for the nine months since we migrated over. That’s a real success story for our ROI.

Collaborating on sensitive content

One of the key pieces of feedback we hear from our lawyers is that the iManage Mobility app interface, which is effectively the same as the web-based product, is extremely easy to use. This app has significantly enhanced our partners’ ability to collaborate on sensitive content within the document management system when they are on the move, which is much of the time — another major win resulting from our move to iManage.

Capturing better risk mitigation

Information security and risk mitigation are critical for law firms, and extremely important to Travers Smith. We need our productivity systems to align with our security strategy. With Zero Trust security built into the core iManage Cloud platform, we know we can trust iManage products to perform to our level of matter security. An industry leader like iManage inspires confidence that the firm is protecting the firm’s and our clients’ most sensitive data.

Like all businesses, we are increasingly seeing threat actors employing social engineering tactics to gain access to people’s devices, and these phishing tactics grow more sophisticated every day. That’s why we purchased iManage Threat Manager when we moved to the iManage platform. Threat Manager provides real-time analysis, notifying us when private content is wrongfully accessed.

We use the tool to track anomalous behavior within our enterprise document management system by monitoring and reporting user activity that deviates from the norm, so we can act on those insights. We also track normal usage for all our users, allowing us to notify appropriate individuals if someone deviates from their standard behavior and find out why. This helps protect the firm from potential attack vectors such as a virus downloading or accessing sensitive content.  

With Threat Manager notifying us of these anomalies in real time, we can act quickly to prevent the loss of our data, should we need to.

Integrating legal project management

In the last four or five years, we’ve seen a variety of legal project management tools come to market that are targeted to specific niche verticals within a practice, such as conditions, precedent, checklists within finance or issues, lists within private equity or capital markets, to name a few. However, it is hard to find products that support a variety of use cases. With the same cross-practice base as iManage Work 10, and with broad application, iManage Tracker can effectively support and scale any type of matter or project list we can create.

Many third-party tools require sending a copy of our document to that application, which immediately puts us out of sync — especially on fast-moving transactions and at the end of a transaction, due to accelerated changes. But with Tracker and Work being integrated on the iManage platform, we can link directly to the active document and be assured we are always working with the most current information.

Tracker has all the flexibility and functionality we need. As it is web-based, we can get an enterprise license, roll Tracker out to the entire firm, and stop using tools like Microsoft Word and Excel for legal project management — a job other applications are not designed to do.

Looking ahead

Supporting future growth

Travers Smith has achieved many efficiency gains and benefits for our lawyers and the wider firm, simply by moving to the iManage Cloud platform. Beyond realizing dramatic gains in our productivity and scoring high on adoption and mobility, we have also improved our security posture and set our firm up for even greater success in the coming years.