Simmons Hanly Conroy (Simmons), a national Law Firm dedicated to complex litigation areas pertaining to personal injury and illness, simply wanted a way to reduce security risks and save space by creating a searchable, web-based document repository. After partnering with Covenant Technology Partners, Simmons achieved more than they ever expected: a solution that completely changed their business.
Before Nintex Workflows, lawyers and the legal teams assigned to each case were in the dark; to find out if a report was completed or if a summons was delivered, a number of phone calls were made and e-mails were sent. Now, every task and report is readily accessible on each case’s dashboard, creating continuity that simply did not exist before.
“We just needed to find a way to work smarter, not harder, and Nintex helped us do that. Nintex is the glue that is tying our line of business to our document repositories. It makes everything seamless and a one step process.”
Keri Buchanan, Director of IT
Before
Simmons had boxes full of sensitive legal documents overrunning their headquarters and multiple warehouses and found themselves in need of even more space; it was clear the firm needed to move their documents from physical to digital storage. Simmons began using eDocs, but was frustrated by the limitations of a non-web based digital document repository—the program was not user-friendly and the process of finding the documents you needed was slow and painful.
This need for a user-friendly, web-based document repository and a growing number of cases and litigation areas prompted a search for solutions. Simmons hired Covenant Technology Partners for a paper reduction project by converting their documents to KnowledgeLake. In the conversion process, Covenant helped Simmons realize a solution using Nintex workflows to automate their slow, manual processes. Before Nintex, the process of assigning tasks and notifying the correct people on each case was completely manual: a legal secretary had to email each person individually to assign each task and to check on the status of a case or task, leaving a lot of room for human error and large payroll overhead.
“We have a longstanding relationship with Covenant. [They] have been managing our SharePoint for years and we trust them.”
Keri Buchanan, Director of IT
After – “Nintex is a game changer”
For each case at Simmons, there is a team, and a number of tasks for each person on that team in their area of specialty. With Nintex, when a new case is signed a case site is automatically generated in SharePoint, the case team is notified, and all of the documents and tasks are in one place and accessible from anywhere. If something changes, the whole team stays up to date and all of the metadata in SharePoint is synced, saving valuable time and money on each case.
Thanks to Nintex and KnowledgeLake, Simmons’ security risks have also been significantly lowered. Because there are no sensitive documents being emailed or downloaded onto personal computers, everything is backed up nightly instead of weekly, and the risks of physical documents being destroyed are misplaced are no longer an issue. “It helps me sleep at night. To know that everything is versioned, backed up nightly, and secure,” says Keri Buchanan, director of IT. “You can’t put a price tag on knowing that the firm’s data is protected.”
The Future
Simmons’ long term goal is to have this complex series of Nintex workflows designed and deployed for every area of litigation within their law firm, saving them and their clients time and money on a national scale.
Because Simmons is becoming more and more efficient with their case sites and tasks, a number of other areas within the firm have also been improved. “This change helped the firm see how other things can be improved, made easier, and become more automated,” said Keri Buchanan.