1.2.05
Charles Russell Migrates to Hummingbird Enterprise
Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance Journal :: News
Hummingbird Ltd., a global provider of integrated enterprise content management (ECM) solutions, has announced that UK-based law firm, Charles Russell, is completing a firm-wide migration from the two-tier client/server environment of DOCS Open®, to the multi-tier architecture of Hummingbird Enterprise™ DM, part of the Hummingbird Enterprise for Legal solution.
The new platform supports the evolving needs of the progressive law firm, introducing a matter-centric way of working for the firm’s 400 fee-earners, offering advanced document management, e-mail management, records management and knowledge discovery, enabling the users to put content into context. In addition, the new platform provides fee-earners with access to matter-related information, documents and e-mails from their BlackBerry® wireless devices.
With offices across the United Kingdom, Charles Russell provides full and integrated legal services to businesses, individuals, governments and not-for-profit organizations. The law firm has been a Hummingbird client for many years, until recently using DOCS Open as their document management system. To support their expanding internal document management requirements and to provide new functionality for the fee-earners, the firm decided to upgrade to the multi-tier architecture of Hummingbird Enterprise DM. The advanced enterprise content management platform will help the firm attain a competitive edge in the marketplace, enhances the service capabilities to their clients, and has delivered significant performance improvements for e-mail retrieval and index searching.
Initially focusing on matter-centric computing for e-mail and documents, the firm has plans to extend its use of the Hummingbird platform to enable full matter lifecycle management, taking advantage of other key components of the Hummingbird Enterprise for Legal suite of solutions such as Enterprise Webtop (Hummingbird’s portal framework), Mobility and Records Management.
“A key driver in our decision to move to Hummingbird DM was the growing focus on law firms being able to demonstrate they can meet the stringent compliance and corporate governance requirements, concerning both documents and e-mail, within the firm and on behalf of our clients,” said Jon Gould, IT Director at Charles Russell. “With Hummingbird DM, we leveraged the sophisticated records and e-mail management functionalities in the product and we now have firm-wide information retention policies, can demonstrate a full audit trail and show total version control capabilities.”
With the upgrade to Hummingbird DM, Charles Russell is moving to a single, centralized repository for all matter related documents and records, including e-mails and attachments, resulting in a reduction in storage costs, improved file security, and increased efficiencies. By providing one view of all information related to a matter, attorneys and support staff will have a “one-stop shop” of all the information they need, directly from within the familiar Outlook environment, a Web browser or Windows Explorer. For large, multinational clients, all fee-earners on a distributed team can get the information they need from one source, irrespective of where they are located – therefore providing better service to their clients.
Charles Russell is also leveraging the sophisticated knowledge discovery capabilities offered through Hummingbird KM to implement a complete knowledge management system. This new system will enable fee-earners to more easily discover the most relevant precedents. In addition, rather than simply searching and retrieving the precedent document only, a user can also search for and populate their matter folders with supporting information and documents.
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Hummingbird Ltd., a global provider of integrated enterprise content management (ECM) solutions, has announced that UK-based law firm, Charles Russell, is completing a firm-wide migration from the two-tier client/server environment of DOCS Open®, to the multi-tier architecture of Hummingbird Enterprise™ DM, part of the Hummingbird Enterprise for Legal solution.
The new platform supports the evolving needs of the progressive law firm, introducing a matter-centric way of working for the firm’s 400 fee-earners, offering advanced document management, e-mail management, records management and knowledge discovery, enabling the users to put content into context. In addition, the new platform provides fee-earners with access to matter-related information, documents and e-mails from their BlackBerry® wireless devices.
With offices across the United Kingdom, Charles Russell provides full and integrated legal services to businesses, individuals, governments and not-for-profit organizations. The law firm has been a Hummingbird client for many years, until recently using DOCS Open as their document management system. To support their expanding internal document management requirements and to provide new functionality for the fee-earners, the firm decided to upgrade to the multi-tier architecture of Hummingbird Enterprise DM. The advanced enterprise content management platform will help the firm attain a competitive edge in the marketplace, enhances the service capabilities to their clients, and has delivered significant performance improvements for e-mail retrieval and index searching.
Initially focusing on matter-centric computing for e-mail and documents, the firm has plans to extend its use of the Hummingbird platform to enable full matter lifecycle management, taking advantage of other key components of the Hummingbird Enterprise for Legal suite of solutions such as Enterprise Webtop (Hummingbird’s portal framework), Mobility and Records Management.
“A key driver in our decision to move to Hummingbird DM was the growing focus on law firms being able to demonstrate they can meet the stringent compliance and corporate governance requirements, concerning both documents and e-mail, within the firm and on behalf of our clients,” said Jon Gould, IT Director at Charles Russell. “With Hummingbird DM, we leveraged the sophisticated records and e-mail management functionalities in the product and we now have firm-wide information retention policies, can demonstrate a full audit trail and show total version control capabilities.”
With the upgrade to Hummingbird DM, Charles Russell is moving to a single, centralized repository for all matter related documents and records, including e-mails and attachments, resulting in a reduction in storage costs, improved file security, and increased efficiencies. By providing one view of all information related to a matter, attorneys and support staff will have a “one-stop shop” of all the information they need, directly from within the familiar Outlook environment, a Web browser or Windows Explorer. For large, multinational clients, all fee-earners on a distributed team can get the information they need from one source, irrespective of where they are located – therefore providing better service to their clients.
Charles Russell is also leveraging the sophisticated knowledge discovery capabilities offered through Hummingbird KM to implement a complete knowledge management system. This new system will enable fee-earners to more easily discover the most relevant precedents. In addition, rather than simply searching and retrieving the precedent document only, a user can also search for and populate their matter folders with supporting information and documents.
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