The Business Need

• Consolidate the number of technology vendors the firm deals with

• Minimize user training by adopting a suite of products with a familiar UI

• Boost efficiency with applications that integrate with the firm’s iManage document management system

• Prepare for the transition to iManage Work 10 by switching to products that already support it

• Find a redaction tool that could better handle large cases

• Provide true redaction to protect sensitive information in Litigation-type departments

• Give legal secretaries one solution for multiple PDF workflows – including conversion, document bundling, and PDF splitting

• Switch to more reliable document comparison technology

• Meet the comparison needs of the Corporate and Banking Departments

• Manage the risk of data breaches to comply with ISO 27001 certification and the GDPR

• Help staff avoid human error when handling sensitive information

• Recognize non-searchable documents and automatically add a text layer

• Ensure historical documents in iManage are discoverable

About ByrneWallace

ByrneWallace is a top-tier law firm with over 40 years of history. With a large team of over 300 professionals, including 46 experienced partners, ByrneWallace is renowned for its expertise and promotion of clients’ interests. The firm was awarded the Chambers Europe Ireland Clients Service Award 2017 and the Irish Law Awards Excellence in Client Service Award 2018. ByrneWallace is the only Top 10 law firm in Ireland with Lexcel accreditation and in 2016 became the first Irish law firm to achieve ISO 27001:2013 certification.

A better redaction workflow

John Kelly, Head of IT at ByrneWallace, described how the firm came to realize it needed a new PDF file editor. “In 2017, the firm received a couple of large cases requiring redaction. The setup we had then only had limited resources for redaction, and it couldn’t do the job. We had to find a better alternative.”

Frances Flynn, Senior IT Application Support Specialist at ByrneWallace, sought advice from a group of IT Trainers who meet quarterly. Members of Ireland’s top firms, the group shares which technology solutions are working for them – and which are not. “Feedback from this group guided us toward pdfDocs because it offered true redaction rather than text-masking.” John described how today at the firm “staff use pdfDocs to redact sensitive information in Litigation-type departments. Plus, its other features like PDF to Word conversion, and document bundling is used by legal secretaries across multiple departments. This was a key benefit for us: pdfDocs does everything in one place, meaning we don’t have to use several different solutions for all these important workflows.”

More reliable document comparison

ByrneWallace now uses compareDocs for more reliable comparison. “Trusting that compareDocs would find every discrepancy and change was key – and after testing and investigating, we were able to do this,” said Frances. Now, “compareDocs is used by both Support Staff and fee earners in Corporate and Banking Departments to find every change in long agreements.”

Managing the risk of email data breaches

Since ByrneWallace is a European firm, it must comply with the requirements of the GDPR. It is also ISO 27001 certified and so must meet additional requirements for information security. To this end, it needed to strengthen its data protection strategy.

“We knew we had to take extra steps to safeguard against data breaches in the current climate,” remarked John. “They undermine compliance with industry regulations and negatively impact our clients.” ByrneWallace, taking advice from the same group of IT Trainers from Ireland’s top-tier firms that recommended pdfDocs, deployed cleanDocs to prevent data breaches. The solution prompts users to confirm email recipients are correct, so information doesn’t end up in the wrong inbox. It cleans document metadata in iManage to prevent inadvertent leaks. “cleanDocs helps our staff work efficiently while they manage the risk of data leaks since it has minimal pop-ups,” said John. “Plus, integration with iManage means simpler metadata cleaning workflows.”

Recognizing hidden documents

John explained the presence of hidden documents was an issue at ByrneWallace “because the firm didn’t actively OCR documents, we ended up with so many that weren’t text-searchable.” This was an unacceptable risk, and the firm looked for an integrated OCR solution that would recognize and process non-searchable documents. “The driving force for change was the risk that we wouldn’t be able to discover historical documents because we couldn’t search for the context.” contentCrawler assesses both historical and newly-profiled documents in iManage and adds a text layer if necessary. Now, staff can search for and find 100% of documents.

Summary

ByrneWallace is using the DocsCorp productivity suite for critical workflows: redaction, comparison, data breach prevention, and OCR processing. Each of the four products in the suite integrates with iManage out of the box. iManage integration is critical for ByrneWallace because, John explained, “all the documents involved in our legal work are all stored in iManage. Seeing how seamlessly the DocsCorp suite integrates with iManage was very important to us.” By consolidating the number of vendors the firm deals with, it has been able to streamline the user experience and make improvements to solutions relied on by staff every day of the week.