What was it like before you had our services?

It was lonely. We had nobody to call. iManage didn’t support our version. It was just like, we were lonely.

Where did you start looking for InfoCompass or any other company you were researching?

Jason, the IT director, and I talked. We pulled our heads together and we also looked at ILTA and saw who did this kind of work. Jason and I have both over 25 years in Legal IT each so between us we got 50 years, so we have a whole staple of contacts to call from.

What was it about our services that made them stand out?

Your team. Sabrina has deep expertise in SQL so she was great to work with. Calvin has a lot of experience with various versions of product. It was the depth of the bench that they were really experienced. Nitza is a good listener. She really listened to what we were looking for and what we wanted to accomplish both organizationally and as well as listening to the records people and what they wanted at least in the first phase of the new version in the instance.

What has exceeded your expectations since working with us?

Lack of problems. It was a little bumpy the first day but that more had to do a bit more with iManage than you. There weren’t a lot of things that got missed. I know this is going to sound you know, when you do these projects, it’s always possible because you don’t really know if the vendor is missing things. Are they shortcutting things? Are they skipping things? You don’t really know until you cut over and a couple of weeks after. But nothing was missed. Or if anything was missed it was trivial and quickly fixed. From the InfoCompass perspective, it was very smooth. Everybody was supported. Everybody knew what to do. They knew how to open the Gera things. I liked that. I liked the Gera. In fact, I’m considering using it for one of my own projects coming up. I didn’t feel like I was working with an amateur. I felt like I was working with someone that had been around the block who knew how to do this. While every particular project had its unique, I felt like you just had to work around the firms preferences a little. You didn’t have to redue the whole process. I felt as though you really knew what you guys were doing and that we were in good hands and that bore out because there weren’t a lot of problems after. It was a good experience. I know it’s sad when the best thing is nothing got screwed up but believe it or not, that’s hard for vendors to do.

What would you tell someone who’s considering our business?

To not wait. If you are in an older version and you know you are going to start the process, do it as soon as possible. Not every vendor is right for every company so I would tell them to really define what they require from the vendor and make sure that the vendor they select meets those requirements. Not select the cheapest or the most popular but to really spend some time figuring out what that firms needs are and selecting a vendor that meets those needs. I think you would do that in most cases but I do think that it’s important to be conscience of that process of selecting the vendor you are going to work with. The other thing I would warn them is that there is a lot of work, preparation wise on the firms side and that is hard to outsource because it’s very particular to your firms data and so that takes time to clean up and it needs to be cleaned up for a successful cutover. I would stress to them that unless of course they just did an upgrade and just did that work. There is a lot of work needed to prepare to do it successfully. That’s true for no matter which vendor you work with. That problem probably won’t go away.

Was there anything we could have done differently?

Of course. Now we are talking weeks later. There is always things that you learn that if you had to do it again which hopefully we won’t have to do it again you would do differently. It’s kind of like a one and done. I mean who goes through college and doesn’t looks back and say oh I wish I would have done that differently right. It’s like that, there is always things to. I guess I was surprised and during the process it was daunting how much work it was going to be to clean up the database. Then I had to work with the other departments to get that done and that wasn’t clear to me in the beginning that the hours I was going to have to spend getting the data to clean up. Telling people about that in advance or more clearly, that would have been helpful just for planning purposes I would have planned hours on my side. It’s still not clear to me and I think it might be very unique to our firm the next steps in leveraging it further. Like uh, we are in the Cloud now and on a new version, we are good but where do we go from here. How do we get even more return on investment. What should be the things that we are looking to do next so that we get more value from this purchase. I’m not saying that Nitza didn’t tell me but maybe sending out just as a quarterly reminder. Like remember when we talked three months ago, these are your next steps so let us know if you want to start on them or when do you think you might start on them just so that it reminds me to keep everybody thinking about moving forward or even if we don’t do anything for 9 months I can have conversations just with the records manager, I can keep providing IT Director different things etcetera. That might be good because ultimately we are going to come back and have Nitza’s team help us with the next steps whatever they are right. It behooves you to keep that conversation going about where we go next. Additional hours for you. Not to bug me but of course, I don’t want an email from you every week. There is a rhythm that works for different people but I would think every quarter just reminding me of what the next steps are so that I don’t forget and I could put them in the plans or encourage others. Think about when are they going to put them in the plans. It’s not just me, it’s not just IT, it’s also Records, it’s also perhaps involving the larger firms particularly if we grow out the interface that attorneys use like the web interface.

What would you say about InfoCompass to others?

You deliver on time and on budget. You really have a deep bench. You know the product and both technically and the interface. You can technically complete the project and you can train on the product.