Solicitous DM
An Australian law firm has consolidated multiple document libraries into one centralized repository. Corrs Chambers Westgarth has migrated 1,000 seats from the two-tier client/server environment of DOCS Open to the multitier architecture of Hummingbird Enterprise, both from Hummingbird. The law firm has offices across five states in Australia, and its 4 million documents formerly resided in separate state-based repositories.
"After considering the top document management vendors, we decided to stay with Hummingbird. It made perfect sense because we were already using the earlier version of its document management system," says Vic Wotherspoon, the law firm's CIO. "By upgrading to Enterprise, we could deploy our new national system, integrate our existing applications including our e-mail software, and most importantly, we can utilize the old DOCS Open repositories, which has allowed us to move to a national system without doing major migration of our state-based repositories."
Hummingbird reports in a recent news release that the new centralized document management system is customized to let the solicitors work the way they want to work. By providing them with a matter-centric view of all documents--rather than the previous author-based method classified according to the solicitor managing the case--lawyers will be better able to track all matters relating to each client and all documents relating to each matter. Corrs customized the deployment to sort client folders alphabetically by client codes, matter numbers and matter names, making it easier for the solicitors to browse through the repository.
The new system is said to integrate seamlessly with the firm's two other core systems—a practice management program and the Lotus Notes e-mail system.
"Since so much of our communication with clients is through e-mail, a key benefit is being able to store all e-mails relevant to a particular matter in our DM system. With our new client and matter-centric view, our attorneys can now keep track of all matters relating to a client, which contributes to better client service," Wotherspoon says.