iManage Work 10

Law firms and corporate legal departments need a document management system (DMS) to store and reuse work product and secure and retain records to meet compliance requirements. However, these are table stakes for a DMS provider.

Lawyers and in-house counsel face pricing pressures from clients who demand greater value and security from attorney-client relationships. A DMS must help legal services organizations transform their business and client relationships. It must help lawyers collaborate on work product, work smart on desktops and mobile devices, and keep documents secure from unauthorized access.

There are many choices for a DMS, including Hyland OnBase, IBM FileNet, iManage Work, Microsoft SharePoint, NetDocuments, and Worldox. I looked at iManage's document and email management software, Work 10.2, because it now supports a cloud-first DMS, mobile and collaborative technologies, artificial intelligence to work smart, and customer managed encryption keys (CMEK) to secure documents and email messages.

Founded in 1998, iManage has a long history of mergers and acquisitions. The Chicago-based company merged with Interwoven in 2003. In 2009, Autonomy acquired Interwoven. Then HP acquired Autonomy in 2011. In 2015, the iManage management team bought the company from HP and turned from acquired to an acquirer.

In 2017 iManage acquired RAVN to find, extract, and act on document content with artificial intelligence (AI). In 2018 the company acquired Elegrity, a provider of conflict of interest, new business intake, and risk management software. Elegrity includes support for ethical walls, legal holds, and data loss prevention. The acquisition will operate as a business unit of iManage led by its CEO and founder, Joy E. Spicer.

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Review: Work 10.2

In August 2018, iManage announced Work 10.2, a cloud-first DMS with full support for HTML 5. In version 10, iManage unveiled a new, intuitive user interface (UI) with a shopping cart motif. The interface has a consistent look and feel across all UIs from the Web to the desktop to mobile devices.

Figure 1. The modern web-based architecture and new UI address a persistent problem with a DMS in a professional organization: user adoption. Most users understand how to navigate retail Web sites and use a shopping cart to select and perform actions on objects.

Leading up to version 10.2, iManage aimed to deliver one release per quarter and has hit that mark with eight dot releases in the last 18 months. The company released a software development kit (SDK) for integrations and enabled technology partner add-ins. It installed a Work panel in Outlook and enhanced security with CMEK, which supports Microsoft Azure HSM (Hardware Security Module), to secure documents and email in the DMS. And it improved offline work with an agent to detect and act on network status, help customers check for new versions, and automatically upgrade iManage and related third-party components.

The iManage search function is a prominent feature of the UI. It sits atop the UI bolstered with a news feed displaying recent document activity to continue work from previous sessions. The search feature supports a type-ahead function and access to previous, saved searches. Start typing the name of a client, and a client name and matter will soon appear to select.

The search function is personalized. It knows the user context: what documents the user has worked on, the user's practice group and office location, and more. It does not return results for cases the user has never worked on or matters the user doesn't have access to.

Figure 2. Advanced searching: Users can easily build the criteria for an advance search as if they were on a shopping site like Amazon or ebay. To search beyond a personalized context to a firmwide search, users select the “All” button to include all documents and email.

The search function is responsive whether it returns 50, 500, or 5,000 results. Like a Google search, iManage's paging feature begins loading search results as soon as they become available to the requesting user. When viewing document results, search terms are highlighted, and filters aligned on the left side of search results narrow the view. The system renders pages for large documents, so users can immediately begin reviewing long, multipage documents. Search results can be sorted by document name or relevance to search terms.

Whether a user is on the desktop, a Web browser, or a mobile device, the underlying web-based architecture is the same, only with different views. However, the Windows and Mac desktop app are not going away—it's where legal professionals want to work. There are a few things that work better on the desktop than in a browser. For example, the desktop has native integration with Word to edit documents and with Outlook to manage email.

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Word With RAVN

Work supports an open dialog between Microsoft Word and the iManage DMS. When users open and close documents in Word, the DMS checks the material in and out, respectively. Checked out items are copied to the local device, where they are saved and synchronized with the DMS copies.

When a user reopens a recently used document from the DMS, it quickly opens the synchronized content from the device if it hasn't been modified since it was synchronized. If a user checks out a document and goes offline, the document stays checked out in the DMS. The DMS affixes a red mark on the document listing, indicating it is offline and locked for editing.

Document properties are viewed in pop-out displays, showing document status and history with access to all versions. Note that auto-save is not a default configuration. A user creates a new, distinguished version each time she saves a document. The strategy makes a unique point of return to a previous edit and solves the problem of creating and then deleting or overwriting text between autosaves. However, if a customer enables autosave, it uses the same save-and-synch function as other documents opened from the DMS.