Chat with an Expert: iManage
Our Chat with an Expert series features interviews with STS team members across areas of expertise. Inside, we demystify technology myths and issues, uncover solutions to common problems law firms face, and share actionable tips and wisdom from our specialists.
- How long have you worked with iManage and what are your experiences and credentials?
Saara Khalid, Project Engineer: I have six years of Legal IT experience, three of which have been spent as an iManage subject matter expert. I have obtained numerous iManage certifications, including the Cloud Technical Onboarding Specialist Certification.
Ryan Whitworth, Service Delivery Manager: I’ve been working in Legal IT for over 17 years and was fortunate to see predecessors to iManage such as Hummingbird DM and Autonomy Interwoven as I entered the field. I’m coming up on 20 years of total IT Experience.
- What is a Document Management System (DMS) and why do law firms need them?
SK: A Document Management System is what we call the use of a computer system or software to store and manage documents. Law firms deal with thousands of documents daily – they have to keep these documents organized, secure, and accessible. The implementation of a DMS allows firms to control their documents, standardize their document practices, and facilitate collaboration to increase the productivity and efficiency of their teams. An effective DMS will cut down on the time spent securing, searching for, and sharing documents, allowing your employees to focus on more productive work.
RW: To de-mystify a document management system, I recommend we think of it as a big digital file cabinet. While we introduce bells and whistles to make the fastest, most secure (and least frustrating) file cabinet, the purpose remains the same – to find the information you need as quickly and easily as possible. In the case of Law firms, you often have multiple independent business units working separately toward the same goal. Each unit has specific guidelines and, at times, formal regulations which dictate how back-end teams should utilize their systems.
A well designed DMS can enable your Practice management, Records managers, Conflicts teams and Billing professionals to work together within a consistent Matter-Centric environment using the same single source of truth.
Legal providers quite often need to comply with audits, and may also need to produce the ‘Why When and How’ they fulfilled a service at any given time. A DMS system can help facilitate a speedy response to both internal and external requests for information, while keeping realization rates from slipping due to missing documents and miscommunications.
- How are most law firms managing their documents today? Is this changing?
SK: We are in the digital age, and many firms are moving away from filing cabinets crammed full of paper files. But, simply moving to digital files doesn’t mean that your files are more organized – or more secure. It’s important to implement a DMS thoughtfully and intentionally to ensure that your digital documents are organized, accessible, and secure.
RW: I read a recent study reporting office workers spend on average 2 hours a day searching for documents and information they need to do their jobs. That statistic represents a loss of productivity equal to 25% of the average work week. We’re seeing a huge upward trend in the adoption of cloud-based document management solutions but there is still a lot of hesitation to tackle the big issues of organization. Due to cost and time, many firms choose to uplift their problems along with their data instead of performing cleanup and streamlining their processes during migration to cloud.
- Why are today’s law firms using iManage? What differentiates iManage from the competition?
SK: Clients use iManage because they are looking for a secure, reliable, and flexible DMS that can be configured to meet their business needs and focus on their work product. iManage sets itself apart from its competitors by supporting a broad range of third-party integrations, allowing for customization of views, metadata, and design, and by offering versioning, journaling, and trash restoration to track and restore past edits of documents.
RW: iManage is a mature, legal-first platform that has built a reliable and secure platform tailored to how legal professionals operate. The platform has taken huge strides in its evolution to accommodate a wide variety of practice areas and industries. Other platforms may have gotten to the cloud first and have their own strengths, but I feel iManage has tied its features, design, lifecycle, and development to the legal industry better than any other solution provider on the market.
- What are some common use cases you encounter when working with iManage clients?
SK: Firms make use of the Timeline feature to recover accidentally over-written changes and see who made what edits. The Refile feature is often used to make sure that file metadata is in alignment for optimal search efficiency. Flexible Folders and Templates allow for flexibility in the folder structure of your workspace while still ensuring that firm standards are kept and that documents can be found easily.
RW: The easy filing of emails has to be at the top of this list. Linking your subfolders to your workspace is one of the easiest ways to organize your vital client communications. Likewise, creating multiple workspace templates by practice area allows firms to accommodate litigation and estate planning departments without relying on a new system. Tagging these folders with metadata creates efficiency as any document saved to that folder is automatically tagged with its document type, making it easy to find a pleading or an agreement even if a colleague had named the document something obscure like ‘filed 3-2-1993 re active complaint’.
- What are your favorite iManage features and add-ons, and how do they work for law firms?
SK: iManage’s journaling (Timeline) feature is a lifesaver for anyone working within legal documents. From the document’s timeline, you can see who edited the document when and even restore it to previous versions or bring back edits in the event that the document was mistakenly overwritten.
For administrators, iManage’s Security Policy Manager add-on makes ensuring document confidentiality simple and transparent. SPM allows administrators to easily control users’ access based on client or matter, group clients or matters together to apply a single policy to a range of matters and retrieve live on-demand reports about workspace security and ethical walls at the click of a button.
RW: One of my favorite features is iManage Threat Manager. We’re able to create rules and weightings for automated alerts, protecting our clients’ most sensitive data. We can also get key insights into adoption, identifying the strengths and weaknesses of our design and addressing it via customization, documentation, or enhanced training.
Lately we have seen a lot of great usage for their Microsoft Power Automate and EntraID Integrations, allowing firms to save on costs and resources hosting on-premise servers by automatically creating users, groups, and workspaces in the cloud with no on-premise infrastructure required.
- Tell us about a successful iManage client story. Have you seen iManage solve any particular problems for law firms?
SK: I helped a client move to iManage from an outdated DMS that didn’t serve their needs. Their data in the old system was hard to search and browse because there was no standardization of document metadata or tags. Because tags and metadata were entered manually by the author every time a document was saved, there were a lot of data errors and misspellings, which made it even harder to find the appropriate documents.
When we migrated the client to iManage, we designed a standardized template for each practice area that had folders for each document type. We also set up workspace generation automation, so that when a matter was opened in their billing system, an iManage workspace with the corresponding client/matter number and practice area automatically was created in iManage, using the appropriate template.
Cutting out that manual entry in the DMS resulted in fewer typing errors, and by standardizing the folder set based on document type, documents became much easier to search and locate. Because iManage applies default properties to documents when they are saved to a folder, users no longer had to manually enter the metadata for the document, which increased workflow efficiency, effectively solving the client’s search issues and greatly improving productivity.
RW: Absolutely. A law firm with multiple practice areas and jurisdictions organized their document profile attributes with metadata for each individual practice area. There was a class for MEMOS, a different class for GEN-MEMOS, GEN-NON-LIT-MEMOS, and MEMORANDUMS, with subclasses for FINAL-MEMORANDUMS, GEN-MEMOS, or GEN-FINALMEMOs and so on for every type of document imaginable.
When the firm attempted to search for a memo, they noted that many documents were missing from the results with no clear way to resolve the issue that led to the missing documents. During Migration to iManage Cloud, I was able to recommend a redesign that incorporated several ways to consolidate these metadata fields. The new design relied on selecting the document category first, with little overlap between other subclasses, removing ambiguity from the process. Once the new design was finalized, we were able to recommend and ultimately set up limits on who could create metadata, and we also implemented Flexible Folders. This combination of solutions made sure that the old habits didn’t encroach into the new system and created a long-term solution to the old issues, the efficiency and predictability that the firm had been looking for.
- How easy is it to train employees to use iManage?
SK: iManage knows that a tool is only useful if your users know how to use it. To that end, iManage has made training easy with their UseiManage add-on, which provides users with access to training videos and quick reference cards to help them feel comfortable and confident using the system.
RW: iManage empowers their customers and partners with a wealth of materials. This includes their YouTube channel with tutorials and knowledge resources, Partner education and certification programs for partners like STS, publicly accessible documentation and insights, customer forums, and product manuals. In the early days, it was a bit of a trend for IT guys to criticize the documentation of the vendors we worked with. But, that’s not the case here– I can honestly say I haven’t seen a company turn that trend around as profoundly as iManage has with their Work 10 platform.
- How secure is iManage? What security features are most valuable for law firms?
SK: iManage knows that data security is paramount for law firms. iManage’s Zero Trust and Zero Touch principles provide strict access controls to prevent unauthorized access and data loss. Document encryption is applied by default for all content uploaded to iManage. Encryption keys remain private and stored separately from content for an added layer of security. Threat Manager allows you to monitor your iManage environment 24/7 for advanced threat detection and even allows automated responses (such as disabling user accounts if a specified threat is detected) to ensure prompt response times when threats do occur.
RW: iManage is one of the most secure Document Management solutions out there – and they can prove it. With some help from support, they can provide attestations for all their compliance reports, audit results, and certifications. BAAs are available for HIPAA compliance, and their governance portal is updated frequently.
- How does iManage help law firms handle confidential documents?
SK: In iManage, documents can be secured based on what workspace they live in. Users and groups can be synced from a system (such as Entra ID or Active Directory) to centralize user and group management. Once synced to iManage, these groups can be used to grant or deny permissions to workspaces, ensuring that only the appropriate members of the team have access to sensitive documents.
For an additional, more robust offering, iManage’s Security Policy Manager allows for clients and matters to be grouped together, and for advanced rules towards access to be set up – such as opposing team sets, which enforces a policy that users with access to one set of matters are automatically denied access to a conflicting set of matters.
RW: iManage enables the easy application of rights, privileges, and access control. Default rights can be assigned to create private folders, and groups created either inside of iManage or Active Directory can be used to refine who can view, edit, re-file or give access to the contents. Group-based security, matter centricity, and a hybrid security model work together to protect client data and facilitate a least privileged security philosophy.
- How does iManage fit into the larger, long-term IT strategy for small and mid-sized law firms?
SK: Implementing iManage is a great strategy for small and mid-sized firms to position themselves to keep up with and take advantage of advancing technologies as they develop. IManage is committed to growing as new technology is developed, and it brings that value to its customers.
RW: As an industry leader in legal technology, iManage provides a platform for a small and mid-sized law firm to scale with virtually no hassle or headaches. Expanding practice areas, creating new business units and teams, or even sharing items with co-counsel at another firm securely are all included in your offering and easy for a partner like us to implement. The habits, workflows, and processes you build as a small firm will follow you into the future and for this reason I feel it is more important at this small to medium stage to take advantage of a platform that works for you and with you than at any other time in your firms lifecycle.
- How do you help STS clients implement iManage?
SK: I start by consulting with the firm to help them utilize the features of iManage and configurations options in a way that serves their needs optimally. Because iManage is so customizable, it helps to have an expert to lay out your options, make best-practice recommendations, and advise on design. Next, I perform the data migration.
This process can be very involved, and it often includes using specialized software to successfully place documents into their new homes in the iManage database. Once the initial migration is complete, I help pilot the software with a select group of users, allowing the firm to see the product in action before they train the rest of their users and roll it out to everyone. This gives them an opportunity to play around with different features, request configuration changes, and present any errors to us at STS prior to the product going live.
RW: I am a workflow nerd. I love to hear how your matter intake process works, interview the parties responsible and ask them what part takes the most time or introduces the most risk. Starting with intake allows us to design a system based around the entire lifecycle of your case work, identifies roadblocks, find pain points for stakeholders, and start a design that works for you.
Next, I like to get a feel for the practice areas at the firm and how each business unit currently performs their duties or creates their work product. This stage enables us to create a metadata map that should help each professional find their documents quickly and easily. We’ll then take advantage of the ETL methodology to Extract data, Transform it to meet your needs, then Load it into your new iManage platform.
Next, we move on to Pilot and User Acceptance Testing, giving you the opportunity to refine the design, tweak settings, or modify branding. Finally, we schedule the cutover and final delta copy ensuring your data is up to date in the cloud on Day One.
- Why might a law firm engage a technology business partner to help them implement iManage? What are the benefits of having a partner to help?
SK: By engaging a technology partner to implement iManage, you gain access to years’ worth of expertise and experience. We serve as consultants, helping to ensure that your configurations are aligned with industry standard best practices and that you are maximizing the benefits of what iManage has to offer. When it comes time to piloting and deployment, utilizing a partner expedites questions and error resolution. When an issue is unable to be resolved, we’re able to escalate to iManage on your behalf.
RW: It is easy for me to boast here that we have migrated tens of millions of documents to the cloud, are able to develop in-house REST API scripts, and have deployed, supported and maintained iManage platforms on-premise and in the cloud for nearly 10 years as a company and even longer as professionals, I think where we really stand apart is this: From an early stage in our development, we’ve been fortunate enough to grow alongside iManage and boast a number of certified professionals in all departments. From your first call to us with an iManage Certified Support Engineer, to your first project with an iManage Certified System Engineer, or a transition with a certified Cloud Onboarding Technician, we have the skills, training and experience to help you at every step of the way. We’re invested in iManage because we’re invested in making systems work for you.
Want to make the most of iManage? We can help.
Experts Ryan, Saara, and the rest of the STS team are here to help law firms:
- Onboard to iManage
- Optimize an existing iManage subscription
- Audit usage, billing, and more to generate more value
- Help teams train and master iManage
- Adopt and manage iManage cloud
- And more
Law firms increase the value of their iManage subscription through our rich partnership with iManage and the years of experience we bring to the table. STS makes iManage projects, maintenance, and daily use easy, with efficient and responsive help every step of the way.
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You’re Invited to Our Upcoming Event
Ryan Whitworth joins us on Wednesday, June 4th to share expert insights into getting the most ROI out of iManage with ease. Get your questions answered by a pro and gain actionable knowledge for increasing the value of your law firm’s iManage subscription!