Perley-Robertson, Hill & McDougall, one of the premier independent Ottawa law firms with an international footprint chose Microsoft Office 365, and SharePoint Online to replace their aging legacy DMS. Perley-Robertson, Hill & McDougall chose Epona Solutions for email and document management which has been in full production use since January of 2020.
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada and Asheville, North Carolina – November 16, 2020. Perley-Robertson, Hill & McDougall, having formed in 1971, already had a major investment technology including an older DMS. With their commitment to lower technology costs, and move to the cloud, they choose Microsoft Office365 for Exchange and it only 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 were impressed. 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 to Mr. Dubois comments by saying: “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. ”