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Denmark-based commercial law firm, Lundgrens, provides specialised legal advice to businesses in the real estate and construction, finance and capital markets, M&A, public company and management and tax sectors. A limited liability partnership, the firm has over 125 employees, including 25 partners out of a total of 80 lawyers.
Ascertus support and technical expertise exemplary, says Lundgrens CTO
Ascertus for support and maintenance
Lundgrens is a longstanding user of the iManage Work document and email management system. In 2017, following an exhaustive investigation into vendor offerings on the market, Lundgrens selected Ascertus for iManage Work support and maintenance.
“We chose Ascertus because the company lays emphasis on quality of service and superior support. Additionally, Ascertus has broad technical skills. This was important as we were looking to upgrade iManage Work to the latest version too,” Nikolaj Brandt Clausen, CTO at Lundgrens, commented.
Holistic approach to the upgrade
Prior to embarking on the iManage Work upgrade project, Ascertus undertook a comprehensive HealthCheck of Lundgrens’ IT environment. This provided both parties with an in-depth understanding of the firm’s IT infrastructure in the form of a baseline of the technology that was currently available.
“Health Check is a definitive way for technology implementors to familiarise themselves with their customers’ IT environment, which in turn is key to their ability to resolving issues in a timely manner, in an upgrade scenario as well as on an ongoing basis. Of course, not many technology providers invest in such activity,” Jon Wainwright, Sales Director at Ascertus Limited, highlighted. “Crucially, it enables the technology partner to assemble an implementation team that has the right capability and knowledge to deliver within the environment in question, efficiently.”
Clausen added, “It took the Ascertus team a week to conduct the Health Check. While it was a full-time effort for the Ascertus team, all we had to do was point the technical consultants to the right areas of our IT infrastructure. Their technical expertise clearly showed. It reassured us that everything in the IT environment was as it should be – before we embarked on the actual implementation of the new version of iManage Work.”
In preparation of the upgrade of iManage Work, Ascertus helped Lundgrens migrate to the Windows 10 operating system and the Microsoft Office 2016 productivity suite. This was necessary to enable the firm to derive the most value from the new version of iManage Work.
“The iManage Work upgrade implemented by Ascertus was very smooth. There was minimal disruption for users,” Clausen stated. “The Health Check was instrumental to this outcome.”
The iManage Work upgrade was delivered in a manner that supported Lundgrens way of working. Ascertus integrated iManage Work with Lundgrens’ financial system. While all new matters are created in the firm’s financial system, all documents related to cases are centrally stored in iManage Work. Similarly, Ascertus integrated iManage Work with Lundgrens’ template management system to facilitate ease of use for users.
“This is yet another example of Ascertus’ broad technical expertise and competence. Our template management system is not one that is offered by Ascertus, but the technical team was able to deliver the integration despite this,” Clausen said.
Excellent quality of service
Today, Lundgrens has a stable and much more functionally rich document management system. Aside from the quality of the product, the quality of service delivered by Ascertus on a day to day basis plays a key role in the firm’s satisfaction with the solution.
Clausen illustrated, “Every month we receive a ‘Status Mail’ summarising all the support issues in that duration along with the current position of each. It provides us with an excellent overview not just on the status of support-related events, but also on the state of the wider IT infrastructure. We deal with many technology vendors, but so far don’t know of any one else who takes this kind of proactive approach to support and customer service.”
Taking document and email management to the cloud
Lundgrens is yet again upgrading the solution to iManage Work 10, which is the latest version today. Clausen explained, “Software is constantly evolving, and we appreciate the business benefits of being on the current version of a technology system, and especially one as core to our operation as a document management system.”
Thus far, Lundgrens has deployed iManage Work on-premises, but with iManage Work 10, the firm will adopt iManage Cloud to take advantage of the latest cloud technology, elastic compute and scalability as well as the most current product functionality and features.
“We evaluate technology systems individually, and for document and email management, the cloud is definitely the right way forward for us – from all aspects including cost, security and indeed future capabilities,” Clausen stressed.
iManage Work 10 in the cloud will eliminate the need for additional investment to purchase hardware and servers. “A fourth of our data is generated from within iManage. In the cloud, we won’t need to support the storage of this data ourselves. This will result in a substantial cost saving,” Clausen rationalised.
Wainwright, added, “We will be using a tried and tested methodology to take Lundgrens to iManage Cloud – an approach that Ascertus has come to be widely recognised for in the legal sector.”
From a user perspective, iManage Work 10 offers advanced mobile capability, which today is essential for lawyers at the firm, who often are working remotely or while on the move from their mobile devices.
Also, the integration between iManage Work 10 and Microsoft Outlook is seamless., With a modern user interface, lawyers at the firm will have a consistent user experience across the desktop and mobile devices. Also, the fact that they are using iManage Cloud will be invisible to them.
Finally, Lundgrens is implementing iManage Security Policy Manager and iManage Threat Manager, to proactively protect data and the firm’s intellectual property – without sacrificing user productivity. For instance, the firm will be able to enforce security policies that support need-to-know access to data and implement ethical walls at scale. Using behavioural modelling and machine learning, Lundgrens will have advanced internal and external threat detection capability too. Worthy of note is that, in Lundgrens’ view these solutions will also support the firm’s efforts to comply with the GDPR in a more effective and efficient way.
Clausen concluded, “We have not looked back since we entered into our association with Ascertus. The quality of support the company delivers is exemplary. We are now looking forward to deploying iManage Work 10 in the cloud. The benefits the solution will deliver to the business and users are irrefutable.”