LexisNexis this week announced integration between Visualfiles and iManage Work; a significant development for firms considering the future of their workflow and case management solutions, with transatlantic firm Womble Bond Dickinson planning to rollout the CMS to new teams to drive efficiency.
The iManage integration follows significant input from Womble Bond Dickinson, and IT applications and development manager Tom Humberstone told Legal IT Insider: “We’ve been working with LexisNexis throughout 2019 to develop Visualfiles to have a tighter integration with iManage but also to embed Work 10 and ensure that the application is workable both on-premises and in the cloud and with 64bit Office. Those are all required by firms that run iManage and we wanted to understand the roadmap and that iManage is baked into it.
“We have a product that is fit for now and the future – LexisNexis has embraced that and has worked closely with iManage and law firms and we were involved in a number of iterations and testing throughout 2019.”
The new integration is significant for many reasons, not least because of the number of firms that to date have told us of their concerns that none of the legacy CMS on the market are future-proofed.
Humberstone said: “We’ve made a strategic decision to use Visualfiles to support our existing workload and drive new work. We’re working on putting it into areas of the businesses that don’t have a solution at the moment to drive further efficiency.”
He adds: “We need to be working with a vendor that is thinking about the future and that strategy has to be backed with products and solutions that help us get to where we need to be. With something like CMS you want it to integrate tightly with your document management system and ours is iManage, as are something like 80% of Top 200 firms, so when you’re looking at strategic investment you want a platform that has strategic integration within your environment.
“It will work on-premises and you can migrate to a cloud model – every law firm is reviewing that strategy and when we’re building internal business cases and planning and making business decisions we need to know the platform is right and the integration is available.”
Visualfiles is a Progress-based system but as of 2014 has been available on a Microsoft SQL Server platform. In 2016 LexisNexis introduced business intelligence capabilities including a real-time data feed with the introduction of the Visualfiles Pro2SQL data repository.Pro2SQL extracts the operational data from Visualfiles and transforms it into a Microsoft SQL database to support any data driven activities, including management information or integration with other data sources – all as an integral module within Visualfiles.
Humberstone said: “Lexis have invested heavily in this integration and have been evolving the product significantly over the last few years.”
While it’s early days as far as plans to extend the use of Visualfiles are concerned, he said: “We are planning and preparing for our next iteration – we’ll get the new platform right and build for the future,” adding, “We need Lexis and iManage to work together, which is really important to support our plans.”
To check which firms use Visualfiles you can check our Top 200. http://legaltechnology.com/top-200/
See also:
Legal IT Win: UK conveyancing giant Simplify selects LexisNexis Visualfiles
And
Walker Morris replaces in-house CMS with Lexis Visualfiles