By Ryan Helmer, IT Manager, Greene Espel PLLP for Epona Legal
Why we left a leading legal DMS for Office365
A document management system
Choosing to leave a leading legal DMS for SharePoint in Office 365 back in 2017 pushed against the prevailing notions of the legal industry, which were that legal DMS solutions were not only the best options for law firms, but the only viable options. But Greene Espel, a litigation boutique, did not build its reputation by copying its peers. There were many reasons for this departure to SharePoint: management and organization of documents, search capability, platform functionality and support, cost, and the near force of nature that is Microsoft’s cloud: Office 365, and now Microsoft 365, the umbrella platform of which Office 365 is a part.
Outgrowing the old DMS
Why limited organization and search capabilities led to a 15-Year departure
One would expect a document management system to excel at managing documents, yet we found that the system effectively provided only two methods by which users—not system administrators—could control the organization of documents for a matter: file names (descriptions) and folders. Our old system offered metadata structures, but they were never designed to provide matter-level, user-driven document management. Even after we had spent considerable time planning and creating the templatized organizational structures and tried to adopt naming conventions, the system offered little more than a pre-defined, high-level folder structure sitting on a file server with a pinch of search sprinkled on top.
Want to know more?
Download the whitepaper “Why we left a leading legal DMS for Office365” here.