Zul Rafique & Partners redefine how the firm makes knowledge work with iManage Cloud

Zul Rafique & Partners (ZRp) has a dedicated knowledge management department that sets them apart from other law firms. The firm’s document management system (DMS), however, was showing its age and growing difficult to use with newer technologies. After comparing the leading DMS solutions available, the Partners decided iManage Work 10 in the Cloud would give their team the best features, security, and user-friendly interface to move the business forward. With help from the local iManage support team and peer-to-peer learning from within, the firm executed a smooth transition of all 200 employees to iManage in a two-month phased rollout. ZRp’s people have been empowered with greater productivity, better collaboration, and happier lawyers, while its IT and knowledge management personnel are liberated from time-consuming platform maintenance.

Zul Rafique & Partners is one of the largest law firms in Malaysia. They employ about 200 people, including 100 lawyers who provide a full range of services across 18 practice areas. Known for supporting multi-million-dollar cross-border deals.

The business challenge

Seize the opportunity to improve productivity and collaboration

Innovative and pioneering, Zul Rafique & Partners is a great place to work. About 10 percent of its lawyers have received long service awards for decades of loyalty. Few law firms in Malaysia have a dedicated knowledge management department, which underscores ZRp’s laser focus on employee empowerment and making knowledge work.

“Knowledge is the lifeblood of our firm, and our dedicated knowledge management, research, and training department gives us a competitive edge,” explains Amylia Soraya, Partner, Intellectual Property and Knowledge Management at Zul Rafique & Partners.
“We work closely with the IT team to combine enterprise knowledge with the right systems to foster productivity.”

ZRp’s lawyers are always on the go, keeping flexible office hours, attending client meetings, and bringing cases to court. Soraya’s team is responsible for ensuring they can access and collaborate on documents and precedents securely from anywhere.

“We were using our legacy DMS for more than ten years, and it was getting harder and harder to give lawyers a frictionless user experience,” she says. “For example, they were logging into the DMS remotely via our Citrix virtual desktop infrastructure, but incompatibilities with the Teams conferencing system meant they couldn’t open both applications at once.”

Switching between apps wasn’t the only limitation. Because the previous DMS allowed only one user to make edits on the master document at any given time, staff must take care not to open a document someone else was working on, lest their changes be lost. This impeded the firm’s ability to maintain a single source of truth for each document.

“Controlling access to sensitive data is so important in legal. IT admins were responsible for folder management and access control — going through them to set up new folders and rename documents,” explains Soraya. “With iManage, authorized users can do that themselves, which is quicker, easier, more secure, and saves IT resources.”

The solution

Invest in employee satisfaction and data security

Soraya and her IT Manager compared numerous document management systems. Impressed with the features, built-in security, and user-friendly interface of the iManage Cloud platform, they worked together to pitch it to the firm’s senior partners for their approval.

“ROI is an important consideration when we’re investing in something new. I won over our leadership team by demonstrating that iManage was a sound investment in firm-wide efficiency. We were impressed that iManage has local support in Malaysia too; that’s unusual for providers in this region,” she reveals.

With support from iManage, the firm kicked off a two-month phased rollout, starting with smaller departments and choosing user champions to encourage peer-to-peer learning. iManage provides continuous training and how-to guides, and as the firm onboards new employees, it runs refresher courses that everyone is welcome to join. ZRp migrated about 6,000 documents into iManage Work 10 in the Cloud, deciding to leave legacy documents in an archive to keep the platform lean. iManage is integrated with Citrix and Microsoft 365, including the Teams app, which is central to their ability to collaborate.

All 200 employees, including 100 lawyers, use iManage Work as the central document repository. This helps partners and lawyers to work together on documents more efficiently, making amendments without the risk of losing changes. Amends are tracked and visible, so there’s never any doubt that they’re working on the latest version, and ZRp can focus on working quickly to meet tight client deadlines.

Lawyers, partners, and pupils are creating folders and using drag and drop to organize files ― there is no need to ask IT to do this for them, and no time lost on document admin.

“The more we learn about iManage features, the more we get out of the platform. The search is much more powerful than our old DMS, surfacing details from within documents rather than just matching file names,” adds Soraya. “We also love ‘recent matters’ and ‘favorites’. The files we’re working on are always just one click away.”

iManage enforces rigorous data security and integrity automatically. IT sets up the policies that control user access. This ensures the right staff can work on the right documents, and if they don’t need to edit a file, it gives employees read-only access to prevent accidental overwrites.