Searching through its network file shares to find electronic documents was frustrating and time consuming for attorneys and support staff at The Van Winkle Firm in Asheville, North Carolina. But the hardware and software solutions that the firm considered to alleviate these frustrations were too expensive to buy and maintain. Instead, Van Winkle turned to the NetDocuments® document management service from LexisNexis®.
Searches that formerly took up to 30 minutes now take three to five seconds—and return more accurate and useful results. The solution is hosted at LexisNexis and available to Van Winkle as a service over the Web, with no server hardware for the firm to maintain. That enabled Van Winkle to implement NetDocuments in just eight days. It costs one-fifth as much as competitors and includes the disaster recovery capability that Van Winkle needed at no extra cost.
The Situation
The Van Winkle Law Firm, based in Ashville, North Carolina, recently celebrated its centenary. There have been days over the past few years when Joseph Travaglini, its Chief Operating Officer, felt as though he’d been there since the firm’s founding.
Mostly, those were the days when the firm’s people couldn’t do the work they do best—because they did not have the technology they needed. Take the issue of finding electronic documents on the firm’s network. With Van Winkle experiencing strong growth, the number of documents it produced grew as well—by a whopping 38 percent over five years. And that was the least of it. The firm maintained those documents in 1.1 million file folders on network file shares, created without any central design or overall plan. With an ad hoc folder system and only the basic Windows Explorer search function available to them, Van Winkle employees had a terrible time trying to track down the folders that had the documents they sought. Searches could take 30 minutes or more, wasting the time of highly trained people. And the relevancy of search results was often low, forcing staff to repeat their searches or to consult colleagues and take up their time as well.
Client Satisfaction, from Document
Management Solution
Overview
Location: Asheville, NC Industry: Legal
Customer Profile:
The Van Winkle Law Firm has served the legal needs of Western North Carolina since 1907, becoming the largest law firm west of Charlotte. It has 36 attorneys and 120 total employees.
Business Situation:
Searching for documents stored in 1.1 million electronic file folders was frustrating and time consuming, wasting the time and energy of highly skilled professionals.
Solution:
The firm adopted NetDocuments® from LexisNexis®.
Benefits:
• Search time cut from 30 minutes to 5 seconds
• Search relevancy increased • New forms of collaboration enabled
• Disaster recovery enabled at no extra cost
• Client satisfaction increased
Product Summary
Practice Management
“I could see the frustration in their faces, hear it in their voices,” says Travaglini. “It never impacted our clients—our people saw to that. But it meant longer days to get the work done. It meant overtime to the firm. It kept people from doing other things that needed to be done, like getting invoices out or troubleshooting our systems.”
Travaglini and his colleagues knew that they needed another way to manage their documents. They looked at other document management systems such as Interwoven, Hummingbird, and Worldox. “We had sticker shock,” recalls Tavaglini. “On top of that, we’d have to hire an additional person to manage them. We didn’t want to spend that much money.” Moreover, Van Winkle had other looming needs related to document management, such as disaster recovery. The vast majority of Van Winkle’s electronic documents resided on computers at the firm’s headquarters. If there were a temporary power disruption or other short-term incident, all of those documents would be unavailable to the firm’s attorneys regardless of where the attorneys were located. And if there were a major disaster at the firm’s offices, those documents could become irrevocably lost. None of the document management solutions Van Winkle considered addressed this need.
The Solution
Then, Travaglini discovered NetDocuments from LexisNexis, the document, e-mail, and records management service with built-in extranet capability and disaster recovery, all hosted externally and delivered via the Web as a service.
After conducting an evaluation of NetDocuments and a comparison of the solution to its competitors, Van Winkle decided to adopt NetDocuments in March 2006. The firm scheduled its deployment activity for about five weeks later. In just eight days of deployment, the firm had transferred its documents to NetDocuments, trained its staff, deployed local software components, and was up and running on the new solution.
The bulk of the transfer of the existing online documents to NetDocuments was handled for Van Winkle by LexisNexis, both speeding the adoption and eliminating the need for Van Winkle’s own, lean IT staff to divert resources in order to manage the process. LexisNexis also provided training for the solution, conducting several interactive Webcasts for Van Winkle staff plus onsite classroom sessions. The goal of the training was to ensure
“We knew we’d get
more productivity
out of the better and
faster searching with
NetDocuments, but
we didn’t anticipate
the increased
collaboration.”
that legal assistants and paralegals were fully prepared to use the solution and to answer questions from the attorneys. The LexisNexis trainer also spent time one-on-one with the power users among Van Winkle’s attorneys.
Van Winkle attorneys get new documents into NetDocuments in a variety of ways that fit naturally with the various ways in which they work with documents. When they create documents in their word processing, spreadsheet or presentation software, they can save the documents to NetDocuments from within those applications. NetDocuments stores metadata about the document—such as the document type, author, client number and matter number—which makes it easier to search for documents later. Van Winkle attorneys and staff can also save their e-mail messages and attachments to those e-mails. They can create workspaces for any given client matter, with folders that mirror their folders in Microsoft® Outlook®.
That makes it easy to drag and drop e-mail from Outlook® to the
corresponding folder in NetDocuments.
The Van Winkle staff also has several ways to search the document repository of NetDocuments. In addition to the full-text capability that was their sole search tool with Windows Explorer, the staff now can search within a single client or client matter, or search by document type (all correspondence, all briefs, etc.), author or any of the other metadata associated with the documents. They can choose parameters from drop-down menus or enter the first few numbers of a known client or matter number, and NetDocuments completes the entry for them.
Travaglini and his colleagues are also taking advantage of the NetDocuments Web-based, software-as-a-service model to enable remote access. Attorneys can access NetDocuments and work with their documents, in their native applications, from anywhere with an Internet connection. An “echo” feature saves accessed documents to the attorney’s local hard drive so, if the attorney loses the Internet connection, he or she can continue working. When the Internet connection is restored, NetDocuments senses that and synchronizes the updated version with the one stored centrally.
Van Winkle is now preparing to pilot the out-of-the-box extranet capability of NetDocuments to explore the possibilities to collaborate more closely with clients. It will set up an extranet for its Health Law Litigation practice, where each paralegal may work on up to four cases at a time for each of four insurance carriers. The NetDocuments extranet will allow Van Winkle to post e-mails and documents that the clients can immediately view at any time.
“People aren’t just
working faster—
they have more
choices about when
and where and how
they work. And that
means our people
are happier.”
Benefits
Before NetDocuments from LexisNexis, document management at Van Winkle was time consuming and frustrating. With NetDocuments, document management has enabled new levels of productivity, collaboration and increased satisfaction—on the part of both clients and staff.
Searches that formerly took up to 30 minutes are now completed in three to five seconds. And the relevancy of returned results is up too, minimizing the need for repeated searching.
“We knew we’d get more productivity out of the better and faster searching with NetDocuments,” says Travaglini. “But we didn’t anticipate the increased collaboration. Because searching is now pain-free, attorneys can easily benefit from each other’s expertise in ways they couldn’t before.”
For example, if an attorney is working on a trust agreement, he might vaguely recall a similar agreement drawn up by a colleague a few years earlier. Maybe the attorney remembers the client name. Maybe the attorney
remembers who created the agreement. With relatively little information, the attorney can quickly bring up the half-remembered document for review, speeding his current work in the process. The matterspaces around which Van Winkle organizes its NetDocuments repository also gives all attorneys and support staff working on any given matter a single place to go to access and share documents related to that matter, eliminating the need to send multiple copies via e-mail and create version-control problems.
The remote access enabled by NetDocuments is doing more than just making Van Winkle attorneys more productive. It’s also giving them flexibility they never had before. “We’re getting more done than ever before—but I see fewer people here in the office on nights and weekends,” says Travaglini. “That’s because NetDocuments enables them to work from home, from the client, from the road, wherever they happen to be. People aren’t just working faster—they have more choices about when and where and how they work. And that means our people are happier.”
The IT staff is happier too. Remote access via NetDocuments relieves the IT staff of the burden and cost of maintaining a virtual private network, the only way to gain secure, remote access under the previous system. In fact, NetDocuments operates without any server-side hardware or software at Van Winkle, relieving the IT staff of any need to manage the solution.
“Our people have enough to do,” says Travaglini. “If we had chosen another document management solution, we’d also have had to hire another person to manage it. We saved that cost by going with NetDocuments.”
“If we had chosen
another document
management solution,
we’d also have had to
hire another person to
manage it. We saved
that cost by going
with NetDocuments.”
LexisNexis, the Knowledge Burst logo, Lexis and Nexis are registered trademarks of Reed Elsevier Properties Inc., used under license. NetDocuments is a registered trademark of NetVoyage Corporation. Other products and services may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. © 2007 LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. LBM00022-0 0607
About LexisNexis
LexisNexis (www.lexisnexis.com) is a leading provider of information and services solutions, including its flagship Web-based Lexis® and Nexis® research services, to a wide range of professionals in the legal, risk management, corporate, government, law enforcement, accounting and academic markets. A member of Reed Elsevier [NYSE: ENL; NYSE: RUK] (www.reedelsevier.com), the company does business in 100 countries with 13,000 employees worldwide.
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That’s only a portion of the costs that Van Winkle saved with NetDocuments. In contrast to the anticipated spending on hardware, software and consulting to implement a PC Documents solution, NetDocuments costs Van Winkle just 21 percent as much to implement. And that doesn’t include the disaster recovery solution—an added benefit that Van Winkle gets with NetDocuments, given its Web-hosted model, but for which the firm would have had to spend another $10,000 to $12,000 if Van Winkle had chosen a self-hosted solution.
That disaster recovery capability is already proving helpful to the firm. When Ashville suffered a power failure throughout its downtown, the disruption could have shut down the firm’s attorneys for the day. But enterprising attorneys drove back to their homes, where the power was unaffected, accessed NetDocuments from their home computers, and kept working. The extranet capability of NetDocuments is also beginning to have a positive effect on client satisfaction, according to Travaglini. “Not many firms our size have extranets—they generally require portals and firewalls and become a major expense,” he says. “So our extranet makes us look like a big firm. It lets us compete with the bigger firms. And it enables us to give our clients more information more quickly than they could get before, so their satisfaction is up, too. As we expand our extranet and our use of NetDocuments, we expect to see even more benefit from it.”
