Leading Australian law firm Allens is set to rollout iManage Co-authoring, in a development that chief information officer Bill Tanner describes as “groundbreaking,” we can reveal.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Tanner said: “Since we moved to the iManage Cloud we have been able to explore Co-authoring. We have a good relationship with iManage and have been part of an early access program. Giving lawyers the ability to edit documents but not lock out other parties is going to be groundbreaking and save so much time working as a team.”
Co-authoring is the result of work that iManage has been doing with Microsoft as part of a wider, tighter integration with Microsoft 365. iManage’s co-founder and CEO Neil Araujo told Legal IT Insider: “This represents 18 months’ of development. It’s a giant leap for the DMS; this level of integration into 365 removes a ton of friction for the end user and for administration.”
Tanner added: “It will remove the friction on a checked-out document: the amount of times that support have to help and need to check that someone is actively working on a document is enormous.”
Available in the ribbon on the iManage tab in Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, or installed as an add-on, iManage co-authoring reduces the need to share documents and split them apart to enable people to work on them simultaneously. While there are many advantages to this in terms of efficiency and eliminating the risk of mistakes in reassembling documents, Tanner says: “My interest is data security. People can jump straight into the document, so you’re no longer having documents in emails, which reduces the size of email and the risk of data leakage. It stays in iManage and has all the controls and governance because it doesn’t have to leave the ecosystem.”
According to Tanner and Araujo, losing control of changes is not an issue with Co-authoring because cloudimanage.com saves a journal for every save that is performed. Araujo said: “It’s a chronological list of changes so you can go back to before an edit was made. In the past if you saved something you shouldn’t have, IT would have to pull the old version from backup, but that isn’t required now.”
Allens, which is a Linklaters alliance partner, started using Co-authoring in a sandbox a few months ago, providing iManage with feedback to help them develop the functionality. Tanner said: “We recently moved it to our production environment and own documents and we’re still rolling it out to people who can provide detailed feedback, but it will be a firm wide thing.”
Araujo added: “Once you’re in the cloud you don’t have to do a massive upgrade, you just turn it on in the admin centre, which makes it very straightforward.”
Co-authoring is not yet available on the IOS operating system and Tanner said: “People are constantly travelling and if they can just open an iPad and use it that will give it great portability.” We’re told that this is coming at the end of the year.
Allens were among the first law firms to sign up to the iManage Cloud and went live two years ago as part of a cloud-first strategy. In 2019 they rolled out a SharePoint intranet and email went online in 2023.
Araujo said of the early access program: “Working with firms like Allens means we can iterate and perfect our product without massive upgrade cycles. It’s easier because you push it out in the cloud and he’s got it, so you can iterate. There has been a lot of work in the back end to make Co-authoring work reliably and consistently, which means we can be confident now it’s out.”