The Drumbeats are getting louder … NetDocuments adds Global Top 10 law firm to Cloud Platform Family
Alvin Tedjamulia, CTO
Earlier this week, we announced that Hogan Lovells, a top 10 global law firm with 49 offices and 7,000+ legal professionals, has selected NetDocuments as its document management platform for the future and key technology provider for the firm’s global innovation initiative.
As Hogan Lovells Global CIO Ash Banerjee stated, “We believe the NetDocuments platform to be a modern and feature rich platform that delivers on our current and future business requirements.”
Many factors played into the firm’s thoroughly researched and vetted decision to select NetDocuments but as our CEO Matt Duncan commented, “We believe NetDocuments' maturity and the scalability of our proven platform, as well as the trust we have earned through nearly two decades of consistently delivering innovative software solutions to our global customer community, were factors in the decision.”
In speaking with our internal team, they felt that NetDocuments' cloud maturity and our complete business focus on Software-as-a-Service and Multi-Tenancy were an important consideration.
Addressing key firm challenges around security and distributed storage are best solved by NetDocuments’ ndFlexStore for geo-aware document and email storage capable of both on-premise and Cloud repositories and the secured Customer Encryption Key Mgmt (CEKM) for dual-custody entropic cryptography.
User adoption is always paramount and NetDocuments’ UI/UX was preferred over competitive offerings based on end user demonstrations and project evaluations.
Furthermore, the strength of our Microsoft partnership was proven by the existing Microsoft Office integration with ndOffice as well as the native integration from Office365, which allows NetDocuments to be a native Cloud Storage Provider for Office 365.
So, what does this ‘new win’ mean to the market, above and beyond being our biggest law firm customer to date?
- Cloud acceptance by global firm. According to ILTA’s 2017 Technology Survey, 77% of firms with ‘700 or more attorneys’ indicated increased cloud technology adoption for 2018. In terms of barriers to cloud adoption, these same firms are a lot less concerned about cloud security, cloud reliability and management acceptance of cloud technology. The legal cloud computing is no longer focused on why? But rather how? And how deep? We have collectively come a long way from 1999 and NetDocuments 1.0.
- Security & governance. NetDocuments solves many of the key challenges large global firms face today around the issues of compliance, client demands, GDPR, and regional as well as global document storage requirements. Multi-national Financial Institutions, Defense Contractors, and Nation States are placing increasingly stringent compliance rules to Law Firms which are specifically addressed by NetDocuments. Law Firms like Hogan Lovells are positioned to challenge the legacy practice of having multiple DM collections in multiple independent libraries as the only way to comply with data location requirements. This affords sense of a "single unified firm" with a single client-document library across all geographies, sovereign locations, local and cloud storage, and global and private libraries, with a single index governing all searches and navigations, subject only to document security and ethical walls. This is what a technology like ndFlexStore will deliver for Hogan Lovells and countless other NetDocuments customers.
- The power and increasing prevalence of the ‘invisible DMS’. It’s all about user adoption and NetDocuments addresses this via flexible user interfaces through ndWeb, ndOffice, ndSync (bi-directional sync between workstation and Cloud), ndMail (with predictive email filing), ndThread (for matter-centric and version centric discussions) and Microsoft Cloud Storage Provider. As mentioned above, our user interface and overall user experience was preferred by Hogan Lovells’ users and will go a long way toward high user adoption. The goal is not just to help the users “like” the document service, but to lead users to not be aware of document services existence by making the DM “invisible.”
- Platform services. NetDocuments is not just DM, but a platform encompassing (1) management of documents, emails, and discussion threads, (2) collaboration with internal and external users, (3) governance platform for security, compliance, data loss prevention, and matter-based data classification with ISO-27001 and 27018, GDPR, ITAR, HIPAA, SOC-2+ compliance, and (4) document understanding for gaining insights on document entities (people, companies, products, financial amounts, locations, dates, etc.), and integration with an ever growing AI marketplace.
As many of you might know, I have been building cloud technology in legal for several decades, and as the co-founder of NetDocuments, always dreamed that we would end up here. We have the most capable and knowledgeable team and our technology platform has not only evolved with the times but has pioneered legal technology innovation disrupting the market. And, the partnerships and relationships we have forged with our 2,300+ customers, in their quest to better serve clients, further emboldens us to keep on pushing the innovation envelope.
Welcome, Hogan Lovells to the NetDocuments global family.
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Global firm with 49 offices, 7,000+ legal professionals embraces modern platform strategy.
Salt Lake City, UT – February 23, 2018 – NetDocuments, the leading secure cloud-based document management, email management and collaboration software platform for law firms and corporate legal and compliance departments, announced today that Hogan Lovells, a top 10 global law firm, has selected NetDocuments’ as a key technology provider for the firm’s global innovation initiative.
Ash Banerjee, Global CIO at Hogan Lovells, commented:
“Replacing our two document management systems with one global platform to leverage our worldwide network and improve our client service is a key part of our strategy. We believe the NetDocuments platform to be a modern and feature-rich platform that delivers on our current and future business requirements.”
Matt Duncan, CEO at NetDocuments stated, “Hogan Lovells conducted a thorough review of product offerings and we are pleased to have been selected as their document management platform for the future. We believe NetDocuments maturity and the scalability of our proven platform, as well as the trust we have earned through nearly two decades of consistently delivering innovative software solutions to our global customer community, were factors in the decision. We are honored to be partnering with market leaders such as Hogan Lovells as we continue to help drive the legal and compliance industry’s transition to the cloud.”
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