Lynne Passmore and Latitude Law sing the praises of DMS

30/10/14

Document management software (DMS) is more than just an electronic filing system.  Although that in itself delivers substantial benefits to businesses migrating to a paperless office environment.

Used to full capacity, DMS is an enabler of flexible working; connector of multiple branches and remote staff; catalyst for reduced carbon footprint; instigator of increased productivity and decreased costs; preserver of sensitive and confidential documentation; enforcer of business continuity and disaster recovery; integrator of disparate applications; promoter of regulatory compliance; distributor of organisational knowledge; provider of improved service levels; and capturer of fee earning activity.

These are mighty claims but ones which Quill Pinpoint’s clients bear witness to.  Lynne Passmore, Solicitor at Lynne Passmore Family Law and high-volume DMS user, describes how DMS supports the firm’s remote working structure with the added convenience of an outsourced IT set up at an affordable price:

“As a sole practitioner, my place of work varies every day.  Mainly, I operate from my home office, but occasionally I work at my Brighton premises or visit clients.  Quill’s DMS gives me access to my entire set of matter files anywhere, whether I’m using my laptop or iPad.  I literally store everything in the cloud.  I don’t need paper files or in-house servers.

“I have one administrative employee who’s also a home worker like me.  To all intents and purposes, we present ourselves as an office-based team but the reality is we work wherever, whenever and however we choose.  DMS is the glue that seamlessly binds us together.

“When I set up my practice, I’d just come out of a big law firm which had a huge internal IT support department.  Obviously I can’t afford this type of resource-intensive structure on my own, yet I still have similar practice and document management requirements.  Quill’s systems give enterprise-level functionality without the cost and trouble of hosting and maintaining it myself.  Quill are the technicians so I leave it all to them.

“Within just one month of setting up alone, I suffered a fairly major IT failure due to an Office update fault.  Thankfully, I’d already gone live with DMS so I was able to recover my lost files which were sitting comfortably in the cloud all along.  Security is one of the main draws of DMS.  Quill keeps my documents safe, sound and compliantly stored.”

Gary McIndoe, Director at Latitude Law, comments on the online nature of DMS which is useful for its employees and clients because both sets of stakeholders have internet connectivity to their document assets:

“Through the casebook feature in Quill’s DMS, we publish our clients’ case documents online.  We then generate and send a unique link and password via email so our clients can log in securely and see the progress of their matters.  This is a completely new concept, so it’s taken some of our customers a little while to warm to the idea.  But, now that they’re on board, they appreciate the increased flexibility it affords them being able to check their updates at any time.

“There are so many advantages of DMS for our company.  We store well over 100,000 documents in the cloud.  All we need is an internet connection and this mass of files is readily available to our managers, lawyers and support staff.”

Gary concludes by explaining the cost savings which the practice has achieved by using DMS:

“We only print and file a very small fraction of our documentation, mostly signed paperwork, so we save lots in paper, print cartridges and storage cabinets.

“The biggest improvements are related to our servers.  Because our electronic files have been moved off site, there’s less stored on our in-house servers which has speeded them back up so our applications are working noticeably quickly.  Our old server was approaching its end of life so we bought a new server in July.  Because of the reduced demands upon it, we were able to purchase a much lower specification replacement.  This saved us £5,000 altogether.  The financial benefits of DMS are substantial, in terms of server equipment alone.”

Julian Bryan, Quill’s Managing Director, adds:

“We’re totally committed to the ongoing development of DMS.  We’ve got a keen eye on making daily working life easier for lawyers and are continually refining our system to better support them in their role.  We’re already guardian for over 2.5 million documents in our secure data centres for our DMS users.  We anticipate further rapid growth as more law firms move towards a virtual office set up.”

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