With more than 45 lawyers and 100 years of experience, Ruder Ware guides business owners and individuals through intricate legal issues around the world, establishing itself as one of the largest and most successful law firms in Wisconsin. To better enable their lawyers and better serve their global client base, Ruder Ware has shifted away from on-premises tools and is moving forward with a cloud-first approach.

In a recent discussion with Nicholas Leininger, IT Operations Director at Ruder Ware, he shared more about the firm’s journey from on-premises document management with Worldox to the cloud-native NetDocuments platform.

Why were you looking for a new document management system?

“From an IT perspective, we have become more cloud-focused the last few years in efforts to continually enable our lawyers to work in better, more secure ways. Where we store and organize our client documents and emails is foundational to our ability to provide world-class client services, and our lawyers live and breathe in the NetDocuments document management system (DMS).

We got to a point where our on-premises Worldox DMS infrastructure was long overdue for an upgrade and no longer supported the ways in which our lawyers increasingly wanted to work. And while we had been on Worldox for over 18 years, and generally a DMS implementation is hard work, we knew it was time to evaluate our options.”

What criteria were used during your DMS evaluation process?

“Our firm is big on how many clicks it takes to do this or that, and we’re always trying to be more efficient. We also wanted to be able to leverage some of the newer features of a more modern DMS, such as predictive filing, which goes back to fewer clicks.

Other major considerations in us moving to NetDocuments included:

• The Cloud Offering – We wanted a provider that was well-established as being cloud-first, not one making the transition to the cloud or a cloud that was really a hosted solution.
• Security – We take security seriously and wanted to make sure the DMS was truly secure and that our data wouldn’t be mingled with other firms’ data.
• Ease of Use – We didn’t want too large of a departure from what people were familiar with, where we would lose lots of productivity just in relearning a new system.
• Anywhere Access – We wanted lawyers and staff to be able to find and get to the documents they need in multiple ways, without needing to have the DMS installed on their system.

NetDocuments was one of the bigger players in the document management space, and it was the only one we found to be cloud-first. It offered the stringent security we require and a lot of features to give our teams the flexibility to work where, when, and how they need to.”

What do Ruder Ware’s users already like about NetDocuments?

“We used to have problems with the Worldox indexer, which could take down certain search capabilities for hours or longer. With NetDocuments, the search is much quicker – lightning fast.

Something else our users really like about NetDocuments is the Home screen and the ability to pin and unpin things, so what you need most often is right there in one centralized location.

Overall, where our previous DMS seemed to get in the way, NetDocuments is there where and when we need it to be.”

“Where our previous DMS seemed to get in the way, NetDocuments is there where and when we need it to be.”

Nicholas Leininger, IT Operations Director at Ruder Ware, L.L.S.C.

What do you have planned for the future?

“We’re just stepping into the customer-facing portions of NetDocuments, so client portals and CollabSpaces will open up a lot of new opportunities. And we’re looking forward to getting our lawyers more used to working on their iPads with NetDocuments, because it’s just so easy to view and edit or markup documents on your iPad and save them right back to the DMS.”

To learn more about NetDocuments and how you can work smarter with an intelligent document management system, click here to request a personalized demo.