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Law
Firm Leverages Contributor Add-In to Drive Adoption of SharePoint
for Email & Document Management
PDF VersionIsrael Fischer
Partner
Fischer Behar Chen Well Orion & Co.
About Fischer Behar Chen Well Orion & Co.
Fischer Behar Chen Well Orion & Co. (FBC) is one of Israel’s largest law firms, dedicated to providing full service legal advice to a broad spectrum of clients. FBC offers its clients sophisticated and high caliber counselling together with a dynamic and pragmatic approach to the practice of law. Recognized for its ability to address challenging legal issues creatively and successfully, FBC prides itself on professional excellence and dedication to its clients.
Application
Legal, paralegal, and administrative staff at FBC use the Colligo
Contributor Add-In for Microsoft® Office Outlook® to support the
consolidation and sharing of case related email and documents in
SharePoint.
Business Challenge
“As a law firm grows, the need for a sophisticated document management
system becomes imperative,” said Israel Fischer, a Partner at FBC who is
responsible for the firm’s knowledge management strategy. “After a
review of several possible solutions, we chose SharePoint for its
scalability, ease of management, and because it integrates well with the
rest of our Microsoft applications and infrastructure.”
Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 was selected as the firm’s document management solution to manage cases, the firm portal, and the Practice Centers. SharePoint would be used to handle the growing list of clients and the large number of associated documents and emails for each case. SharePoint would also be used as the firm portal for enhancing internal communications and to consolidate information such as HR forms, company news, and links to legal sites. Finally, SharePoint was to serve as a knowledge repository for their Practice Center which would house best practices documents, legal email updates, legal electronic newsletters, professional materials, legal document templates, and legal research. These documents are an important part of a firm’s knowledge base and it was important for all staff to be able to store, organize, and access the information.
In addition to managing documents, FBC wanted to manage emails in SharePoint. “We found that as a firm, more than 50% of case related information was emailed through Outlook,” explained Fischer, “so it was critical that we not only manage our documents in SharePoint, but that we also manage our emails. With lawyers storing case related emails and files in their Outlook folders and with emails being replicated in several folders or computers, it was difficult for other lawyers working on a case to access the information when they needed it.”
Since FBC professionals are very experienced Outlook users, the adoption of SharePoint would be greatly facilitated if they could leverage their Outlook expertise and important features like right-click and drag-and-drop. “We really wanted to utilize the same Outlook interface and provide the same Outlook experience to our staff for accessing SharePoint,” said Fischer.
Solution: Colligo Contributor Add-In for Outlook
To help meet the goals of their SharePoint deployment, FBC chose
Colligo’s Contributor Add-In for their legal and support staff. “We knew
that to drive adoption of SharePoint, we had to make using SharePoint as
easy as using Outlook,” said Fischer. “Colligo Contributor Add-In gives
us the ease of use features that we were looking for and effectively
leverages our investment in both Outlook and SharePoint.” The firm will
be managing hundreds of client case sites using SharePoint and the
Contributor Add-In.
Rather than working in two different interfaces, the Colligo Contributor Add-In enables FBC to use the familiar Outlook interface and standard features such as right-click and drag-and-drop to manage emails and files in SharePoint. FBC lawyers are able to move or copy emails and attachments to document libraries with a simple drag-and-drop, while automatically capturing message fields. “With Colligo, we get the same capabilities of Outlook and because it’s so easy to move emails and files in and out of SharePoint, our lawyers and support staff have not had to change the way they work, which has significantly increased the adoption of SharePoint.”
“We had a long and complicated antitrust case that really highlights the positive impact of the Colligo Contributor Add-In to our firm,” added Fischer. “One of our lawyers working on the case had amassed over 1500 case related emails that were organized in 40 different folders and subfolders on her computer. A single email pertaining to a witness interrogation could be relevant in as many as ten folders, so she would have to find the folders and copy the email several times. Since four lawyers were assigned to the case, it also meant that folders and case emails were being replicated in four sets of PST files.”
Using the Colligo Contributor Add-In, all emails were consolidated into SharePoint. The original structure of Outlook was mirrored in SharePoint with message fields including To, From, CC, Date, and Subject automatically captured as metadata. A special and easy to use column was created and previous folder names were turned into metadata values. This enabled lawyers to quickly sort and find emails based on metadata rather than having to look through multiple folders and sub-folders. An additional comments column was added for users to enter additional custom metadata to assist in searching the document library. All four lawyers now access one SharePoint site. “Using the Colligo Contributor Add-In has greatly improved the legal team’s ability to collaborate in addition to making it much easier to find information using the search capabilities of SharePoint, “ said Fischer. “SharePoint and Colligo have improved efficiency, access, ‘findability’, and collaboration.”
“The Colligo Contributor Add-In provides an excellent solution for
email management in SharePoint,” concludes Fischer. “It enables us to
fully utilize SharePoint to centralize case data and because it’s so
easy to add emails and files to SharePoint, our Practice Center is
growing with well indexed documents that are easy to find and share.
Colligo provides excellent customer service and worked hard to ensure
that their product seamlessly supports our content and metadata in
Hebrew, which is extremely important to our staff and clients”
Results
By deploying Colligo Contributor Add-In, FBC has gained many benefits:
- Consolidation of case related emails and files in one location
- Improved adoption of SharePoint via familiar Outlook interface and features
- Increased collaboration and knowledge sharing among legal and support staff
- Enhanced search capabilities through email and document metadata and filtering
- Email management integration as part of document management
