LegalVision is a market disruptor in the commercial legal services industry. Their innovative business model and custom-built technology help their lawyers provide a faster, better quality, and more cost-effective client experience. Named the Innovator of the Year in 2016 by the Australian Law Awards, LegalVision is a leader in delivering legal services in Australia and has assisted more than 15,000 businesses.
Challenge
The LegalVision team was quickly expanding and outgrowing the file syncing software that they relied on to manage their business documents. With over 60,000 files, they needed to find a more centralized platform that would help them solve issues with versioning, files being overwritten, and security permissions for their growing staff. However, as a startup, LegalVision didn’t have the resources to build and maintain an expensive file server.
They were already using Google Workspace, however, when it came to document management, they were looking to do more than what Drive could offer in terms of managing permissions and editing files directly in the cloud.
LegalVision management also wanted the ability to set up a custom permission system. “We didn’t want employees to have to think about who should have permissions to files or folders. We just wanted them to work on them and put them where they should be,” explained Evan Tait-Styles, LegalVision’s CTO.
They looked for alternatives to their existing setup and found AODocs to be a perfect complement to Google Workspace. “The folder structure and permission settings have allowed us to quickly and efficiently get new team members on board.”
Results
LegalVision worked with the AODocs team to figure out the most efficient way to migrate the 60,000 files living in their SugarSync server over to AODOcs libraries in Google Drive. Evan said that after finishing the migration project, the key for him and his team was getting LegalVision’s junior lawyers on board with the new system. They became internal advocates that helped train the more senior employees and quickly got everyone up to speed.
“From the admin side, AODocs has been excellent,” he said. “Before we swapped over, we would spend a good portion of our time sorting out issues with the existing file systems.” With the majority of LegalVision’s lawyers working on a minimum of 10-15 Word documents a day, the ability to edit Microsoft Office files directly in the cloud has had a significant impact on their overall productivity.
“In terms of day-to-day, our lawyers can access their files from wherever they need to and don’t have to worry about syncing them back to the server or uploading the latest version,” Evan said. “If we required them to download each file they needed, edit it, and remember to re-upload it back in the right location, they wouldn’t do it.”
The permissions systems that Evan and his team set up allowed them to give specific groups within the company access to different libraries and team folders.