TrustRadius Insights for iManage Work are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Intuitive User Interface: Users consistently find the user interface of the document management system DMS intuitive and easy to navigate, making tasks easy. Many reviewers have praised how effortlessly they can locate features and perform actions within the DMS.
Efficient Organization: The organization of files and groups within the DMS is simple and easy to use, allowing for efficient access and collaboration. Several users appreciate how this organizational structure enables them to quickly find and work on documents without any hassle.
Customizable Features: The customizable features of the DMS are appreciated by many users, as they allow different departments or sections to have their own access and partition the document system according to their needs. This flexibility in customization has garnered positive feedback from numerous reviewers.
iManage is used by every single person in my firm. This is how we build and maintain client data and files! We also use for letter template and document management as a firm. It is very helpful for client reporting. I use iManage extensively each day to save emails, documents and other correspondence.
Pros
Correspondence storage
Intuitive folder naming
Data organization
Cons
Recent matters dropdown in chronological order, not numerical order
View PDF files in preview panel without opening
Likelihood to Recommend
Honestly, iManage been the only file software used in my legal assistant career thus far. So my experience is that it is pretty intuitive and user friendly, but I also don't have other software programs as a comparison. The configuration and format is not difficult to become familiar with and learning to navigate it doesn't take long.
To store and maintain documents and files. We are now completely paperless and heavily rely on iManage to run our law firm. This includes litigation, and we have different file formats depending on what the case involves.
Pros
Document storage
File maintenance
File sharing
Cons
Keeping recent matters list in chronological order
Recent matters list not in numerical order
Able to drag and drop documents without having to download
Likelihood to Recommend
To me, iManage is THE filing software for a law firm. There is not much I would change at all. Admittedly, it is the only filing software I have used since beginning my career in law but it seems ideal to me. How documents are categorized and filed makes sense to me.
VU
Verified User
Administrative Assistant in Legal (Legal Services company, 501-1000 employees)
As a multi-location law firm, iManage Work allows us to securely handle secure document sharing and storage. It is used by the entire organization of 200+ users. The software allows us to efficiently and securely house all of the data required to run a law firm. Without iManage Work we would struggle to manage the large amounts of data required for practicing law.
Pros
Secure document handling and storage.
Integration into Windows operating system.
Document version management.
Cons
Make updates easier to manage/deploy.
Migration from FileSite to iManage Work was overly complex.
Add tools to oversee program usage.
Likelihood to Recommend
There aren't many options for secure document handling and storage tailored for law work, but iManage Work does seem to do this work well.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Information Technology (Law Practice company, 201-500 employees)
Used for document management across multiple departments within my organization (finance, accounting, HR, and sales).
Pros
The range of different types of files you can save all in one place is unmatched.
Ease of use
Makes it easy to ensure the latest versions of documents are being used.
Cons
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
Likelihood to Recommend
Best if you have the time and energy to devote to implementation and training. Can be a very powerful tool if harnessed correctly, however, there is a large learning curve for companies to be prepared for.
This is our firm's document management system to store our firm's documents. We use it as a knowledge base to effectively organize unautomated precedents and other useful documents. We also use it as the primary means that our users can securely access firm documents outside of the office. We are starting to look at the co-authoring functionality too.
Pros
Security
Access documents remotely
Effectively storing in one place, practice-specific documents, e.g. precedents, guides, and checklists
Cons
Better knowledge bank functionality
Likelihood to Recommend
Law firms have tens of thousands of confidential documents. The system is very secure and intuitive irrespective of whether the user accesses the system in or outside of the office. Being easy to navigate, new starters can be taught best practice and adopt it quickly to ensure effective capturing and sorting of knowledge.
VU
Verified User
Team Lead in Legal (Legal Services company, 201-500 employees)
iManage Work is our primary ECM resource. It's used by the whole organization and eliminated paper filling.
Pros
It's easy to use but a very powerful tool.
Supports multiple document versions.
Allows a combination of versions in different file types (i.e. .docx; .pdf).
Cons
Saving a document in multiple matters in a single action.
Likelihood to Recommend
iManage Work is a powerful ECM solution. It turned our firm into a paperless firm and provided good support through its Brazilian partner (DocWise). The exchange rate made it quite expensive to use outside the US, but it is still worthy.
My company uses iManage Work in every department. This document management system enables us to easily share, access, preview, find and secure documents. It also offers quite a bit of customization in the end user interface, such as right click menu options, allowing us to add and remove or rename features.
Pros
The search features are fantastic. While it takes quite a bit of resources on the back end to make this happen, it searches document meta data, such as name, date created, author and so on zippy quick. But more importantly for us, any text readable document (Office documents, Text Searchable PDFs, etc.) are indexed and easily searchable as well. Users are presented with a powerful search screen to limit search results with a large variety of meta data search filters and key word searching in an easy to understand format. With a document library of over 3 million documents, this is a critical need for our business.
The integration with the Microsoft Office products is flawless. We have several add-ins for our Office suite and most of them cause our IT Department some grief, but the iManage integration just works, which is great for IT and the users. Our users love the FileSite integration, which allows for published workspaces to display in their Outlook tree. Since our users are in their Outlook working email all day, this integration allows them easy access in an application they are already familiar with to interact with our DMS.
The history of the documents, tracking which users have accessed, edited, saved, opened, printed, etc. documents is always correct. We've had to use this history multiple times for tracking user access or interaction with documents for a variety of reasons and it's easy to follow and always correct.
Cons
The iManage Communication Server, which interacts with iManage and Outlook, filing emails to the workspaces has always been bug riddled. Our current version is the most stable we've seen yet, but we still have issues every few months. We often find suddenly linked Outlook folders (which allow users to save emails in Outlook folders that in turn link to the DMS to automatically save a copy of that email in the iManage folder the user linked) aren't filing the copies in iManage anymore, in other words, the linking is broken. IT has to restart the Communication server, then the user has to recreate their Outlook folder and move the unlinked documents to the folder to kick off the filing process again. The worst part is that unless the user notices the filing isn't working, there's no monitoring IT can do to determine the linking is broken.
Due to the nature of how iManage captures the File-Open/Save function of applications, there are times that it leaves documents checked-out on user machines. When a user opens a document, it locks the server copy, creates a local copy on the user machine for edits, and when the user closes the document iManage copies the local copy to the server overwriting the original (by default) to save the changes. Sometimes, the process of writing the changes back to server doesn't happen so the local machine copy (the latest changes) are only on the user machine and the user much check in the documents manually. This happens a couple of times a month for almost everyone at my company. It's usually not a big deal, until an employee is terminated. If IT forgets to check-in that user's documents before the user machine and account are wiped, then the edited documents is lost forever because it only exists on the user machine.
iManage works with Windows Server native encryption features to allow you encrypt documents. Microsoft's native encryption is crude and problematic at best, especially with roaming profiles. iManage needs to partner with other software encryption technologies to offer alternatives for encryption at rest and in transit.
Likelihood to Recommend
iManage Work is extremely well suited for companies with lots of documents. It allows for pretty easy security groups and searching functionality that makes large document repositories manageable for users. iManage Work would be horrendous overkill for small companies with less than 75 users or less than 2 million documents. The software is rather expensive, as is the annual maintenance, but with a large number of users and/or documents, that expense is worth it due to the time-saving features of always being able to locate the documents quickly, even when a user 'misfiles' something.
