No More Paper Trails
When the system the law firm had put in place with the help of a solution provider wasn’t up to par, Fish and Richardson went searching for another VAR to help solve its document management woes.
The Washington-based law firm was using Kofax Ascent Capture Version 6.0 software, so they went to the vendor to find a new partner. Kofax pointed them to Quality Associates, a Columbia, Md.-based solution provider specializing in imaging and document management.
Quality Associates, about half of whose clients fit into the midmarket space, was put on the incoming mail problem. The solution provider upgraded the law firm’s Ascent Capture software to version 6.1 and reconfigured it to operate smoothly. “Fish and Richardson is one of the largest firms practicing intellectual property litigation and corporate law. As a result, much of what they process is a very high volume of patent applications,” said Scott Swidersky, director of Quality Associates’ Information Systems Division.
“They had all of this information, and it was critical for them to be able to deliver that information to the appropriate people very quickly,” he said. “Our response was to educate them with what we believed would be the right tool for dealing with their circumstances in dealing with unstructured data.”
Elizabeth Kocourek, program manager at Quality Associates, also added that the Kofax solution is a good fit for Fish and Richardson because it is scalable and can be expanded as the law firm’s electronic document management needs grow.
In addition to upgrading the law firm’s software, Quality Associates sold it an Ascent Capture Internet Server, which added Internet and intranet capabilities to the document management software. Integrating this software allowed the firm to have a more robust and reliable platform for receiving documents while working remotely, said Chris Swidersky, director of technical services at Quality Associates.
“Their main priority with this system is mail. All of the mail within Fish and Richardson is distributed to one central location in Minnesota,” he said.
Mail must be scanned and sent from the Minnesota facility to be distributed to lawyers by noon each day.
“We also helped work on a custom panel which enables them to automate a large piece of the data entry that has to happen for every piece of mail. Each piece of mail that comes in is designated to a particular lawyer. That data has to be entered into a system, so that it knows what lawyer it has to go to,” he said.
The results aren’t in yet, but Rolf Hille, director of practice systems at Fish and Richardson, said that he expects the new document scanning and management system to produce cost savings in the future. “We don’t really anticipate a significant reduction to cost until the entire system is fully implemented,” he said.
The new system does seem to be saving time for the law firm’s employees. “We have had attorneys on an anecdotal basis indicate to us that it’s giving them half an hour a day in the management of their practices,” Hille said. “Our next step is to capture all of the outgoing mail. [We’re in] the process of developing that for this calendar year and then we’ll have the complete electronic file, and once we have that complete electronic file, then we can start seeing some ROI as far as having to deal with the paper files—less storage,” he said.
For Quality Associates, working with a client as technically savvy was a learning experience.
“Especially for a law firm, Fish and Richardson is a very technical company, and they are very involved in automating the document flow within their law firm. We had to come up with a system that added to the automation that they already had with their existing system. It had to be something that matched it or that was better than it,” Chris Swidersky said.
In spite of that technical savvy, Fish and Richardson was glad to bring in the solution provider.
“[Considering] the scope of the project, I don’t think there’s anything out there that would be available off the shelf,” Hille said. “We’re very pleased with the work that they’ve done for us.”