Madgwicks Lawyers increases productivity using a PDF editor with iManage integration

Learn about:

Switching to a PDF editor that supports iManage Work 10
Features like high-quality OCR and export to Microsoft Office
Combining documents
The benefits of a single technology vendor

About Madgwicks Lawyers

Madgwicks Lawyers was founded in Melbourne more than 40 years ago. Today, it is an awarded firm with nearly 100 members of staff and a key member of Meritas, a global alliance of 191 business law firms across 96 countries.

Introduce a PDF editor compatible with your systems

When a law firm’s PDF editor integrates with its document management system, it means fewer steps to get from A to B. For example, users can convert external documents to PDF to profile them into their system. Or, they can convert existing documents into PDF and save them as a new or related version. This helps to streamline workflows and ensures accurate versioning.

The PDF editor Madgwicks used was not compatible with the newly introduced iManage Work 10 cloud-based document management system. Scott Butler, the firm’s IT & Project Delivery Manager, said they were told support would come eventually, but it wasn’t clear when.

The incompatibility between the two products was causing problems for users. “There were issues with checking in documents, and changes to documents not being saved within iManage that I couldn’t get fixed outside the vendor’s patch release cycle – which appeared to be random,” Scott explained.

Basic PDF editing workflows like exporting a PDF to Word or Excel were not what they needed to be, either. If a PDF export result isn’t high quality, it could cost the user hours spent recreating the original version in Office. An in-built OCR feature – which, in PDF editors, means the user can edit the text of a scanned document, or a photo of a document – was not performing as expected. Scott said that “the accuracy rate was well below what I had experienced with other applications in the past.”

Issues like these can affect the accuracy of the documents’ contents – which is compounded by the fact that a single case or matter can involve hundreds or even hundreds of thousands of files.

Life with an integrated PDF editor

To resolve these issues, Scott and his team worked with ACP Solutions to find a PDF editor that integrated with iManage Work 10.

pdfDocs was recommended to the firm because it is certified ‘iManage Work 10 Ready’, and DocsCorp is a trusted iManage integration partner. The pdfDocs/iManage integration is built via the modern REST API, which gives users the flexibility to integrate into different iManage environment (on-premise, cloud, or both).

Now, the staff at Madgwicks can access PDF workflows from the iManage Work 10 browser, including:

Edit, open and save
Convert to PDF and save as a new document or version
Export a PDF to Word or Excel
Redact sensitive information
Send multiple files to a PDF workspace for editing or bundling
Add a text layer to photos or scanned files using in-built OCR
Use pdfDocs binder to combine various documents and create an electronic binder

Time-saving PDF workflows are also available within Microsoft Office and Outlook, which pdfDocs also integrates with. Users can right-click to open and edit email attachments, for example, and then save them into iManage Work 10.

As well as helping staff at Madgwicks to get their jobs done faster and more accurately, stable integration has meant they aren’t slowed down by performance issues. “pdfDocs is solving all these issues for us and more,” Scott said.

Improving document comparison at the same time

Switching out core legal applications is not something law firms do every day of the week. So Madgwicks worked with ACP Solutions on finding a better alternative to its document comparison application at the same time it was replacing its PDF editor.

Scott explained that the users weren’t happy with how accurately its previous application was comparing documents for changes. The results were hard to understand and generally didn’t make document review more efficient.

ACP Solutions recommended compareDocs because, like pdfDocs, it is certified ‘iManage Work 10 ready’.

The integration makes it easier for users to stay across different versions by comparing two documents for changes. Then, they can accept or reject the changes in a Word document marked up with Track Changes. The updated file can be saved back into iManage Work 10 as a new version or new document.

Users immediately found compareDocs to be more accurate, thanks to its native comparison method. compareDocs doesn’t convert files to a proprietary format before comparing. Instead, it runs the comparison at the direct file level, so it doesn’t have to open the source document each comparison. This not only results in a faster, more accurate comparison, it also reduces the risk of document corruption.

Summary

ACP Solutions helped Madgwicks resolve issues with compatibility between two of its core legal applications. It recommended the firm switch to pdfDocs and compareDocs since they were applications that integrated out-of-the-box with the firm’s iManage Work 10 system. They were also known in the legal technology industry to be both reliable and accurate. Now, Madgwicks’ staff have fewer barriers to efficiency and are better equipped to deliver a high-quality service to its clients.

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