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The records manager of a key magic circle law firm has estimated that every lawyer in the UK spends at least one hour a day looking for files.

When Interwoven WorkSite first launched in the UK, the attitude of the legal IT world was, what chance does a newcomer have in such an established market?

Within the space of a few years, Interwoven has emerged as the key choice for any large firm looking for a system capable of providing a multi-office, multi-site solution.

According to data published by the influential Legal Technology Insider newsletter, in 2001, just 24 law firms in the UK were running Interwoven document management systems, compared with more than 55 firms using document management systems from then market leader.

Other facts to consider:

October 2005: Interwoven now dominates the UK DMS market space with 61 major law firms as DMS clients, whilst the competition have seen their numbers fall.

Interwoven is gaining new sites and winning business, by way of competitive swap-outs from firms who had previously been running rival DMS products.

Major UK firms buying document management systems during the past few years have bought from Interwoven.

More than 290 firms worldwide have switched from their current provider of DMS solutions to Interwoven.

So what is the secret of this success?

In this special report for Legal IT’s fifth anniversary edition, award winning technology journalist and industry analyst Charles Christian looks at some of the reasons why Inter-woven now has its software running at the heart of more and more major law firms.

Although supposedly a specialist market, the legal software sector is notorious for having suppliers who are not fully in touch with what their customers want. They supply what they think their customers need, and not what best addresses their issues.

By contrast, Interwoven has taken the exact opposite route and adopted a customer-centric approach to marketing. The company’s focus has always been the issues which keep law firm senior managers awake at night — and then solving them.

As well as the usual contacts with existing users, this liaison also involves Interwoven’s annual legal IT leadership summit for the technology partners, CIOs and IT directors of some of the world’s largest law firms including, significantly, both customers and non-customers.

This overall approach, which could be best summed up as"tell us what you want and if we make it, will you buy it?"has guided some significant initiatives over the past few years.These have resulted in Interwoven evolving from being just another document management systems supplier to a company whose technology now lies at the heart of more than 900 law firms and legal offices around the world.

Along with the steady expansion of Inter-woven’s product portfolio — from the original WorkSite document management software and on to matter-centric’ document management, e-mail management, disconnected working and records management systems — the company has ensured that its products keep abreast of the broader trends and developments within the legal market.

‘Matter-centric’ document management Matter-centric computing has been a buzzword in the legal world for some time, but Inter-woven was one of the first suppliers to be able to actually deliver a solution to address this issue.

In a nutshell, matter-centricity is increasingly being seen as the most effective way to solve the problem of how you create the digital equivalent of the old paper file.This is in sharp contrast to the current situation in most law offices, where the same information relating to individual matters exists in an electronic format but is located in separate islands — or silos — of information spread across a whole range of disparate IT systems.

Linking these diverse information sources to create a truly joined-up legal practice is more than a just an interesting technical project. Given the pressures of running a modern law office there are also very powerful business drivers behind the move towards matter-centric computing and, in the process, streamlining access to information for partners, department heads, fee earners, practice managers, paralegals, secretaries and any other information workers within the firm.

Interwoven can deliver a single point of access from within the existing main user desktop of outlook onto all this information, whether it is current correspondence, billing information, financial reports, e-mail messages or even archived documents relating to a closed matter, plus the ability for workgroups to share and collaborate on the use of this information, regardless of where they are physically located. The addition of Interwoven’s new OffSite module also gives disconnected workers full access to the matter files.

Another development Interwoven has been at the forefront of is end-to-end document and matter lifecycle management. Documents may be the glue that holds a modern law firm together but in the current legal business environment a document management system must be able to provide more than merely a version control and filing system for current documents.

The system must be able to account for a document from the moment of its creation or, in the case of e-mail messages, file attachments, faxes or scanned-in hard copy documents when it enters a firm through its entire lifecycle — including all the many redrafts and revisions it will go through — up to and including its archiving and possible destruction.

Nigel Blackwood, head of IT, explains that, "One area of business pressure for us at the moment is compliance. We need a solution that enables us to manage and track documents from creation to deletion. We see the move to WorkSite 8, and importantly its e-mail and records management components as key to providing our firm with full document lifecycle management. This encompasses creating, filing and archiving documents and related e-mails, sharing these documents and providing a full audit trail of usage and access."

The system therefore needs to combine conventional document management (Interwoven WorkSite) and e-mail management with a records management (Interwoven RM) facility that can look after both traditional storage issues and document retention policies.

Furthermore, the modern document management system need not stop there because today’s draft agreements become the templates for tomorrow’s precedents and so can form the foundations for a firm’s knowledge management infrastructure. This is a facility Interwoven can also help leverage additional benefit through its technology, so content can be accessed internally via an intranet or even opened up further through a client extranet.

Risk Management

Closely allied to the concept of matter and lifecycle management is risk management. Risk management takes many forms, from the ability to ensure document retention and destruction policies are rigorously implemented and complied with — to avoid a repeat of the Enron document shredding scandal, to conflict of interest with increasingly stringent government and international standards compliance, including Sarbanes-Oxley.

Law firms often encounter problems as they are unable to adequately defend themselves against claims because they cannot locate the appropriate files or, as is often the case with e-mails, they have been inadvertently deleted.

Once again, these are all issues Interwoven can address because the emphasis within its product range has shifted from just documents to the management of all the files in a matter — including e-mails and hardcopy — from inception through to, depending on retention policies, their destruction.

Integration with Microsoft

A third area where Interwoven’s policy of paying close attention to the needs of its customers has paid ample dividends is in regards to integration with Microsoft family of both back office technologies, such as SharePoint Portal Server, as well as front office products, such as Microsoft Office 2003, Microsoft Outlook and the upcoming Office 12 platform.

The attitude of law firms to this relation-ship can best be summed up in the words of David Hamilton, the IT director of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer: "We see tremendous value for our firm in the strategic relationship between Interwoven and Microsoft. We use both InterwovenWorkSite and Microsoft Office extensively across our organisation. Having our two main software suppliers working even more closely together will make this a seamless and straightforward implementation and will help us simplify our IT operations and future development roadmaps. This relationship is a winning combination for customers."

So has Interwoven’s customer-facing strategy worked?The figures speak for themselves.

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