Solving the File Sharing problem for firms

While ensuring that the legal professionals at your firm are maximizing their efficiency is a key factor in both providing better service to clients and increasing your bottom line, improving productivity is often challenging. One of the most common problems with enhancing efficiency falls not with the individual, however, but with a firm’s collaboration processes.

Collaboration is an unavoidable situation for legal professionals, and the sheer amount of time required for document identification and comparison tend to slow a firm’s typically streamlined work strategies. However, the implementation of collaboration technologies has the potential to reduce the amount of time spent on locating the proper document when it is needed.

According to an analysis conducted by the team at iManage, a commonly used document management and secure file collaboration tool, reducing the amount of time spent per document by even one minute can have a significant impact on a firm’s bottom line. At six documents per day, the amount of time saved over the course of a month may affect profits by $800 to $2,000 per attorney.

While there are other file sharing services are used across a variety of industries, their simple technology fails to meet the standards of privacy and governance required in the legal field. Similarly, an extranet or enterprise-grade solution may create a new set of issues; although the control exerted over this type of technology by security and IT professionals reduces the risk of exposing sensitive information, their complexity may result in inexperienced users compromising the demands of privacy and governance in an effort to meet practice or self-imposed deadlines. Considering the fact that these services provide too little in the way of security and extranets and enterprise-grade technologies may increase the risk of professionals making inappropriate concessions, practices are faced with tough decisions when it comes to selecting document management and collaboration software.

At a recent webinar, Ben Di Marco, CIO of De Grandpré Chait, an IT firm in Montreal, shared that his staff has worked to address the evolution of technology needed by legal professionals over the recent years; after completing a review of the collaboration solutions available to attorneys, Di Marco determined that iManage Share was a suitable file sharing method for firms facing the urgency that litigation often brings. Additionally, Di Marco’s team also discovered that the fast implementation and security of iManage Share creates an ideal set of circumstances for legal professionals; when combined with the fact that the software requires little in the way of user training, it proves to an excellent option for today’s attorneys, who expect to be able to access their documents anytime, anywhere, and want to do so without compromising the client’s sensitive data.

The team at MacroAgility has a strong commitment to providing the firms that we serve with exceptional, secure collaboration software, and our goal is to meet the ever-changing needs of our clients. Our staff takes governance and security as seriously you do, making MacroAgility, the iManage partner, an ideal option for legal professionals.