iManage Work is a document management solution formerly known as HP Worksite. iManage was divested from Hewlett-Packard in 2015 and is now an independent company, headquartered in Chicago.
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Litera Draft
Score 9.3 out of 10
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Litera Desktop is a single toolbar designed to include everything a lawyer needs to draft documents and create an integrated, seamless experience that ensures user adoption and consolidates vendors.
iManage is well suited to managing the large volume of documents and emails that are created on a daily basis. Lawyers can get dozens if not hundreds of e-mails a day, and we need something to do with them. Deleting them is often not practical, because you may require the information a year from now. Leaving them in Outlook is also impractical, because a large Inbox will slow Outlook down. Outlook has an archiving feature, but this doesn't really help for collaboration (and your colleagues are likely out of luck if you end up unavailable due to emergency). iManage is less well suited to small organizations (ex: sole practitioners and small firms) because it is does require a significant investment in implementing and maintaining the software. iManage Work is well suited for large law firms, because it is great for collaboration, including between different offices.
Litera Desktop has many functions, but it is still a user-friendly program. Very easy to implement and easy to train. We send a variety of documents to clients and other legal professionals electronically. Litera will clean and scrub documents so that there is no hidden metadata when the documents are transferred. This keeps not only our clients and their files safe, but it keeps our email programs safe and clean as well.
The system can be fairly buggy. I have issues with freezing, and a lack of responsiveness each time I use it ( although not for long and does not prevent me from getting what I need to be done, it's just annoying).
It has a slightly larger learning curve to use than other more simplistic records managers
You need to be careful when using a PDF Filler to turn off (easily done by un-checking a box that pops up alongside the forwarding email) the Metadata removal, as it will empty everything from the PDF form that you just added.
It has been what our firm has always used, and overall everyone seems to be pleased with it. It is user friendly and intuitive and it doesn't appear we have any intention of changing what we use for our purposes.
To me iManage is very intuitive and user friendly. The switch from the application vs the Outlook extension was an adjustment, but it was one I made pretty easily once it happened.
I gave Workshare Compare such a high rating because I don't think I could do my job without it. It has just become so integral to my workflow, that if I were to ever change jobs I think I would have to insist my new employer to me a license. It is fast and just works 99% of the time. It is very rare that it gives me errors, and when it does it's likely because the underlying document is corrupted, not because of any issues with Workshare Compare.
We had an issue a few years ago where a plug-in of some sort which allowed the viewing of PDFs got updated and then whenever some people previewed PDFs in iManage then Outlook would crash. My outlook crashed over 20 times in a single day once. It was a pretty bad time. I know one of our information technology professionals in another office worked non-stop with iManage to get it resolved, and it seemed like they did take the issue pretty seriously.
MS SharePoint requires a lot of time to integrate and efforts are expensive compared to iManage product. iManage is quick setup and well integrates with existing on-premise environments and integrates well with major iDP systems for authentications and manage RBAC systems for permissions via API calls.
The only other program I've used that performs a similar function is Microsoft Word, which does have a comparison feature built in. However, I find the Microsoft Word comparison harder to read and slightly less accurate. For example, I think Workshare Compare does a much better job in determining when you have moved the text to another part of the document (rather than showing it as a regular deletion in one place and in another place).
Since our policy is that all client documents are saved into iManage, we have been able to keep an email retention policy for Exchange to 90days to delete. This has saved us significant resources in both Exchange management and hardware to support excessive email storage for archived databases or extremely large databases.
The ability to search documents quickly by text inside the documents allows to review previously created contracts and use similar language that is well suited to a new project over again without having to spend time manually opening and searching ourselves. The software does it for us.
We used to store old files at an offsite storage facility for a monthly fee. We have implemented a new procedure, where we now scan these old paper files into our iManage system, making them text searchable PDFs. Since the software has such robust searching capabilities, this makes the documents much more accessible when needed than requesting an offsite storage delivery and having to manually pull paper files. In addition, we have saved thousands of dollars a month by not storing paper files offsite any longer. If the searching were not so powerful, we would not done this because our old paper storage system worked well for us previously.
