After a year-long review, respected New York law firm Kelley Drye & Warren has swapped out its legacy on-premise OpenText document management system for NetDocuments’ software-as-a-service cloud-based DMS offering.
The Am Law 200 firm, which has 300 lawyers and seven offices, including one office outside of the U.S in Belgium, reviewed input from dozens of customers of different DMS products and ran detailed demos and working sessions with practice groups.
A final proof of concept allowed Kelley Drye to test the speed of working with large files in a cloud-based system, and after some optimisation, the firm concluded that NetDocuments was faster than its existing solution when it came to working with and downloading large files.
“We wanted a modern and trusted cloud platform that could take our firm into the future, rather than just another DMS which would be a lateral technology move,” said Matt Luzadder, partner and member of the technology committee at Kelley Drye.
“NetDocuments will help us adapt to the ever-changing legal technology landscape, as well as meet personnel and client needs for security and usability. The NetDocuments cloud platform will enable our firm to achieve levels of mobility and security simply not possible with the traditional document management system stack,” said chief information officer Judith Flournoy, a well-known ILTA member and presenter who returned to Kelley Drye in 2012, after spending eight years as CIO at Loeb & Loeb.
Mobility was a key driver in Kelley Drye’s decision to choose NetDocuments. Specifically, the firm valued NetDocuments’ built-in mobility, which does not require additional hardware, modules or user/device licensing.
“A document and email management solution is only powerful if users embrace it, and mobility is a key component of that,” said Flournoy. “Our users, both in the extensive working sessions and proof of concept, appreciated NetDocuments’ modern feel and ease of use. It’s not often that a single technology solution can provide both improved usability and improved security and compliance. Only true cloud technologies can enable this kind of innovation.”
OpenText, which counts Hogan Lovells, Allen & Overy, Eversheds, Gowlings (now Gowling WLG), Travers Smith and Baker Hostetler among its law firm clients, recently lost OpenText eDocs client Cuatrecasas, Goncalves Pereira to NetDocuments, led by CIO Francesc Munoz Molina. Farrer & Co made a similar transition in 2014, led by head of IT Neil Davison.
You can read our interview with Francesc Munoz Molina here