The Law Society of Alberta has implemented the Microsoft 365 Epona Matter Center and Epona DMSforLegal. Perley-Robertson, Hill & McDougall in Ottawa has also chosen Epona Solutions for email and document management, which has been in full production use since January of 2020.
The Law Society of Alberta, which regulates the legal profession in the province of Alberta in Canada, has implemented the Microsoft 365 Epona Matter Center and Epona DMSforLegal. The document management system is being used in key departments that manage lawyer information and will be rolled out across the remainder of the organization during 2020 and 2021.
“Epona was the right solution to help us more efficiently manage lawyer information because it could be configured to work seamlessly with our pre-existing technical infrastructure,” says Andrew Norton, chief information officer and director of business operations for the Law Society. “Being able to integrate Epona with our other third-party applications to develop a custom design was essential to meet the document management needs of our staff.”
Keith Vallely, Vice-President of Epona USA, said: “Canada is a high growth market for Epona and we continue to add firms, companies, and institutions, much like the Law Society, to our expanding client list.”
This is borne out by a further win for Epona: Perley-Robertson, Hill & McDougall, one of the premier independent Ottawa law firms with an international footprint chose Microsoft Office 365, and SharePoint Online has also opted to replace their legacy DMS, which we understand was OpenText eDOCS.
Perley-Robertson, Hill & McDougall chose Epona Solutions for email and document management, which has been in full production use since January of 2020.
Perley-Robertson, Hill & McDougall, formed in 1971, has made a commitment to lower technology costs and move to the cloud. They chose Microsoft Office365 for Exchange and say that it made sense to fully utilize the platform. What made the decision hard was they had several tens of thousands of matters related content, and a deep investment in Aderant for their financial practice management. When they learned of what Epona could do, in terms of providing a fully custom DMS that could be configured to meet their needs for today, and still keep all the old content as fully accessible, while adding easy email management through Outlook, they made the decision to move. After 10 months of production use, a pandemic working environment, and working through the myriad of old systems to new systems ‘gotchas’….Perley-Robertson is very happy to have made the change to Office 365 and Epona.
Joël Dubois, head of litigation group at Perley-Robertson had this to say about Epona: “When we began the process of moving from our old DMS to the new DMS, we were extremely excited and focused on getting it done. After we finally cut over, the real test of adoption began. Epona’s team were able to adeptly move through the myriad of challenges that we faced, and now, in hindsight, I am very pleased with our new system as are our users. Having the ability to design a DMS for our use, and leave behind what was a DMS designed in 00’s, was tremendously valuable for firm of 2020.”
Ildiko Huber, CFO of Perley-Robertson added: “One of the things I love about the system is how naturally intuitive it is to use. There are so many different ways users work with Microsoft software, and nearly all of their usual habits for working remained the same. I love my department’s OneDrive and now we can find everything as search really does work. Our support staff can take full advantage of a DMS even though we arent using it for the practice of law. It really is great.”
Keith Vallely, Vice-President of Epona USA, said: “We are doing a robust business in Canada, with the expansion of business in Ottawa being particularly robust, which we attribute in part to Grade A, who is an excellent IT Services partner for Epona, as well as word of mouth in the city of Ottawa. Perley-Robertson is an excellent firm, and it showed in the way they rolled out the solution, how well they worked through the challenges of major migration of content, and the vast change they went through. Joël and Ildi are now part of my Canadian family. ”