File Vine is well-suited because I believe it was invented to assist Law Firms with document organization for the legal cases collected in a Law Firm. It is easy to navigate and find your documents with a click of a button.
NetDocuments positioned itself to work in the legal industry, and it has done a very good job. It's kept pace with the challenges presented by the law and it's grown in its offerings. Any organization that must balance mobility and security would benefit from the use of NetDocuments as a platform.
we are able to duplicate our file types from Sharepoint in Filevine giving us a unified look at our files
We are able to create subfolders in Filevine to help give each project a more clean look and feel when we access documents
We are able to integrate our medial records requests with Filevine
We are able to integrate Outlook with Filevine and we are able to email /forward emails into projects.
Project Hub in Filevine is a God-send! We are able to see a snap shot of our projects and can filter our view of our projects and which team may be handling each project!!
File Organization. Netdocuments is a great tool to neatly organize your virtual files and separate them by workspaces (matters). Each workspace contains folders (document types) that can be customized according to users' needs and preference.
Searching your data base. All the documents and emails saved in Netdocuments are searchable. The search feature works great.
Cloud based document management system. Simply put, Netdocuments can be accessed from ANY web-enabled device. This is becoming more and more important in the age of satellite offices, working on-the-go, and telecommuting.
Disaster preparedness. Should something happen to your office, your documents are safe, secure and accessible.
Seamless integration with Microsoft Applications. Netdocuments provides users with Microsoft applications integrations that can be easily installed on each individual machine.
Support. There is an extensive on-line help library which provides incredibly helpful articles with step-by-step instructions. If you cannot find solution on-line, telephone support is staffed by courteous and knowledgeable people.
Security. This is especially important for a law firm. A designated administrator can put in force workspace, folder, document, or profile-based security.
In my opinion, VERY Expensive. You can not find documents without OCR. OCR doubles your storage cost as they save the OCRd document as a second version.
In my experience, very annoying latency, even when trying to preview documents. As a result, folks in my office often try to save locally as opposed to storing in the cloud.
I orginally signed up for NDMax. However, it would only process one document at a time. I am not a transactional firm, so, in my opinion, this was essentially worthless.
I dock a few points because of the setup it requires. If someone in-house can handle that then the score goes up. It really depends on the firm and their personnel. Once it is setup though, I think anyone can get in and do what they need to do
The product is simple to learn and adheres to well-known web user protocols. The NetDocuments team spends a lot of time talking to customers regarding how to improve their interface, and are pretty quick about implementing good ideas. The system is reliable and repeatable, and similar functions are laid out consistently and in formats that users are used to.
NetDocuments is a performant web app. It is reliable and provides all the functionality of a sophisticated document management system. It also can serve, through its APIs, as a base system for other applications, which enhances its value. Other vendors find the company easy to work with, and it consistently seems to be the first to offer new features and technologies to its customers.
I've never had to contact support, but I won't give it a ten. We've had a few hiccups along the way, but nothing that couldn't be fixed within 24 hours.
I’ve tried Clio, MyCase, and PracticePanther. Clio is super user-friendly with lots of integrations, MyCase is great for billing and communication but more limited on automation, and PracticePanther is easy to use but not as strong on reporting. Compared to them, Filevine feels more customizable and workflow-focused, though it does take more time to learn.
WatchDox and WorldDox both provided what looked like similar features but too much of the technical requirements fall on the customer and they, at the time of my evaluation, were not true cloud products. They were client \ server-based product hosted in the cloud. If you do not know the difference, research until you do. iManger is a viable alternative if you are just not able to get the internet speed you need for NetDocuments. But heads up it is not the Swiss Army knife for security features like NetDocuments.
