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Intelligent SME . tech spoke to Stables to find out more about the implementation and how it has enabled the organisation to scale .

Can you give us an overview of the challenges that you were looking to address ahead of implementing this solution ?

Upon joining the firm in May 2018 , I carried out an exercise to understand exactly what the IT environment looked like . IT hadn ’ t received the right investment over the years preceding and had reached a point where we needed to almost start everything over again .

The core systems the law firm uses revolve around its practice management system – which traditionally handles the time and billing processes – and the document management system , which is the essential system of record .

We looked at which of the two was causing the most pain in the firm and it was by far the document management element . It was that impetus , as well as the complete and total IT transformation that we were executing , which led us down the route of selecting NetDocuments for this particular project .

What is driving your IT transformation and strategy to move more services to the cloud ?

As a firm we recognised that technology was really going to be a differentiator and could enable us to offer more options to clients .

When I arrived at the firm , my vision was really around the fact that although we could do what every other law firm does and be the same , we could actually get ahead of the pack and start to start to innovate .

We ’ re a growing firm , having taken on a number of people throughout lockdown , so we need to be flexible and enabling that flexibility is really the whole ethos around having a cloud-based strategy .

Why did you ultimately decide to work with NetDocuments on this project ?

I ’ ve had the privilege of working in legal services for a long time in various different firms , as well as in financial services , so I ’ ve seen several document management systems .

When it came to choosing the system for Forsters , I knew there were two big players in the legal IT document management market in the UK . And then , it was really down to the technology front and the underlying fundamental technology for NetDocuments is a true cloud system . It just performs well out the box and we knew it would be flexible enough to give us what we want .

In normal times , quite a few people end up travelling globally and with NetDocuments they have a system that ’ s accessible wherever they are . NetDocuments is also so well aligned with Microsoft and , as we ’ re adopting Microsoft Teams , that alignment is really going to start to pay off , because we ’ re going to have integration .

The implementation was remotely led – tell us about that experience and any challenges that you encountered and how these were overcome ?

I think the credit there really does go to Verlata , our Australian implementation partner . The start of the project , which involved interviewing people to understand how each area of the practice is using the document management system , was done face to face in the UK .

Because we ’ re working with a cloud document management system , the fact that Verlata were in Australia didn ’ t really matter . And when it came to our data migration into NetDocuments , we gave Verlata remote access via Citrix to our systems , so documents weren ’ t going from London to Australia and then back up to the UK again .

We went live under lockdown , so it wasn ’ t quite the same ‘ go live ’ experience that

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