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.
Loading Reviews List....
iManage Work Reviews
8 Reviews
Professional, Scientific, and Technical ServicesLaw Practice4Legal Services3Information Technology & Services1
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)
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.
iManage Work is used by our organization as a document management system. We set up folders in iManage for each of our matters (and then subfolders within each matters), and then file documents and e-mails there.
It solves a couple of business problems:
most files at large corporate law firms require teams of lawyers to work on a particular file. This helps us share documents among the internal team.
document retention. When you've spent 100 hours working on something, it's generally a good idea to file all of the e-mails so that you can retrieve the information if an issue with the file comes up in the future.
knowledge sharing. When a lawyer is looking for sample language, they can look at similar documents that colleagues have done in the past in order to expedite the work flow.
Pros
The full text searching feature, once implemented properly, is incredibly powerful.
Integrates seamlessly with Outlook to reduce the number of pieces of software you need turning at any given time.
Filing is relatively quick most of the time.
Cons
Proper implementation of the software is important. We have a client who also has iManage for their large in-house legal department but the implementation seems to have not been as thorough so their experience with the software has not been as positive.
Again, proper implementation is key to how powerful the software can be. For a long while our organization did not have the full-text searching implemented, and it was a game changer when we finally did it.
I understand that our implementation of iManage does not allow for multiple template matters based on different situations. So we have five default folders, but it would be nice to have a couple of templates, with different numbers and names of the subfolders depending on the situation.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
VU
Verified User
Professional in Legal (Law Practice company, 1001-5000 employees)
iManage Work works as a document management and collaboration tool between individuals and external parties. It stores documents securely in the cloud and provides an organized format for maintaining and editing them. Oftentimes, the primary source of accessing and editing documents is via an Outlook add-in which embeds as a sidebar to search and pull files as well as save new files.
Pros
Very reliable, once setup it is usually pretty flawless outside of Outlook-related issues.
Simple and easy to use organization of files and groups.
Customizable for different departments or sections to divide up access and partition document system.
Allows collaboration with outside parties and makes sharing documents quick and easy.
Cons
Complicated setup. On initial installation it is cumbersome to configure on each workstation just to connect to service.
Does not enforce structure. Once setting up structure, users can save outside of iManage Work and make their own files and folders under pre-configured system.
Outlook is a finicky software, access to iManage Work depends on Outlook, nothing against iManage Work, but it sometimes has issues caused by the application it relies on.
Likelihood to Recommend
iManage Work is a great solution for a smaller business. It provides a quick, easy way to store and share documents. It works with Outlook, which almost everyone utilizes, so it's a good way to get into document management. iManage Work is capable of scaling, but it is not necessarily the best solution for it. There are many other solutions that scale very nicely for enterprise size.
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.
