Document Management Case Study.
Document Management for Macfarlanes
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Streamlining Document Management and print room archiving at Macfarlanes.
Macfarlanes is an independent law firm in the City of London. The company’s 290 lawyers handle complex and high-value transactions and provide their clients with a highly flexible and tailored legal service.
Macfarlanes' clients range from multinational companies to private individuals. The firm provides a comprehensive service in its chosen areas of expertise, handling work of a quality and scale that places the firm amongst the leading law firms in the City. Much of the firm’s work is international, advising both overseas and UK clients on cross-border projects.
Out-of-date archiving system impedes document retrieval
As part of day-to-day operations, Macfarlanes prints, distributes and archives a vast range of documents. The firm’s print room processes hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation per month. The task is huge, with documents ranging from hundreds to thousands of pages, including, for example, complete sets of evidence pertaining to a case in progress.
All print jobs need to be archived so that they can be reprinted in future, if necessary. However, with their old Xerox system, finding a particular document for revision or printout was sometimes a problem because search functionality was very limited.
Two Xerox systems were being used to manage the documents. These required the print jobs to be ‘registered’ so that they could be identified using key fields such as ‘client’ or ‘subject’. Faced with the need to upgrade their existing systems, Macfarlanes decided to undertake a full review of their print room requirements and look at available document management options.
Choosing Document Manager
Macfarlanes came to the decision that they needed a solution that “could take anything they threw at it” and was future-proof.
“We wanted something that was resilient and cost-effective, and which was able to effectively archive the increasing volumes of electronic documents we were receiving from clients.” says Print Room Consultant Bill Turner. “It was the global power of Document Manager that impressed us.”
Benefits of Document Manager
- Central management and storage of documents
- Easy integration with variety of legacy imaging and document processing systems
- Ability to handle a wide range of document types including files from Macfarlanes' Xerox, Toshiba and Ricoh print-engines
- Maximising return on existing investment in copiers
- Faster access to archived documents with more sophisticated search functionality
- Improved productivity and enhanced customer service
The Document Manager Solution
The Document Manager Search Service played a vital role within the Macfarlanes archiving solution – dramatically improving the ability of users to search the archive for specific documents.
Many of the existing documents within the Macfarlanes print room archive were not adequately indexed. The Document Manager Search Service enabled full-text indexing to be performed on all of the documents held. This then provided the search engine with access to all of the textual elements within every document in the archive which enables far more precise and comprehensive searches to be performed by later users.
Users are now able to accurately search the archive for any “keywords” they wish. This makes it much easier to locate previously lost documents.
“We can now handle monthly or weekly sweeps to check anything that an operator has failed to archive. Things used to get lost. Now, they don’t. Searching is lightning fast by a very wide range of search criteria, and each user can easily establish their own search titles”, says Turner.
“Ultimately, we will save on storage space because we can compress graphics and restore them without loss of quality. The Document Manager solution gives us very comprehensive legacy document OCR search capability. This means we can go back years to recover information that previously would have been difficult if not impossible to find – and print out in any desired format”, says Print Room Consultant Bill Turner.
“Essentially, the solution for our print room means saving time and cost – and getting at archived information faster and more easily. We now have one consolidated database instead of many – and there is no degradation of data.”
