Top-Five Israeli Law Firm Drives SharePoint for Email and Document Management

Ranked among Israel’s top five law firms, Fischer Behar Chen Well Orion & Co. (FBC) is recognized for its ability to address challenging legal issues creatively and successfully. FBC implemented Microsoft SharePoint as a document management system to support the firm’s rapid growth.

SharePoint enables the FBC team to manage cases, the firm’s portal, and Practice Centers, all on one collaborative platform. To improve adoption, efficiency, ease of use, FBC chose Colligo Contributor Add-In for Outlook. The solution enables FBC professionals to easily move emails and files in and out of SharePoint, within the familiar Outlook interface, while also capturing critical metadata to ensure the quick retrieval of emails, documents, and other legal resources.

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 counseling, together with a dynamic and pragmatic approach to the practice of law.

Application

Legal, paralegal, and administrative staff at FBC use the Colligo Contributor Add-In for Outlook to support the consolidation and sharing of case-related email and documents in SharePoint.

Business Challenge

Fischer Behar Chen Well Orion & Co. is a successful firm with enormous potential. As it began to grow, the need for a robust and easy-to-use document management system became vital to the firm’s success. To build this system, FBC chose SharePoint for its scalability and ease of management.

As the firm’s document management solution, 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 best practices documents, legal electronic newsletters, professional materials, templates, and legal research.

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 Israel Fischer, a partner at FBC who is responsible for the firm’s knowledge management strategy. “It was critical that we not only manage our documents in SharePoint, but that we also manage our emails.”

“Our goal was to use the Outlook interface to provide a familiar experience to our staff when accessing SharePoint,” said Fischer.

Solution: Colligo Contributor Add-In for Outlook

FBC chose Colligo Contributor Add-In for Outlook 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 can now manage hundreds of client case sites using SharePoint and Colligo.

Colligo Contributor Add-In for Outlook 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.

“We had a long and complicated antitrust case that highlights the positive impact of choosing Colligo,” 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. 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 Colligo Contributor Add-In for Outlook, all emails were consolidated into SharePoint. Lawyers were able to quickly sort and find emails based on metadata, rather than having to look through multiple folders and sub-folders. “Colligo has greatly improved our legal team’s ability to collaborate, in addition to making it much easier to find information using the search capabilities of SharePoint,“ said Fischer.

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,“ concludes Fischer. “Colligo Contributor Add-In for Outlook provides an excellent solution for email management in SharePoint.”

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
• Increased collaboration among legal and support staff
• Enhanced search capabilities through email and document metadata
• Email management integration as part of document management