1. Why did the firm upgrade to Interwoven (formerly iManage)?
A continued history of lost/irretrievable documents, several a week. Full text indexing would not work properly. And we experienced a less than acceptable level of support from our previous vendor.

2. What system did you have in place and for how long?
We were a Hummingbird/Docs Open user for 2 years; switched to WorkSite in 2000.

3. How many offices converted to WorkSite?
At the time of the conversion, November 2000, we had 14 offices with 2,100 employees.

4. How many documents were converted?
2.1 million documents.

5. What tools were used for your firm's conversion?
The DOCS to WorkSite Conversion Kit. We also used a custom tool to migrate projects and saved searches. We did not convert the history records.

6. What was your roll-out plan and how long did it take?
We decided on a cut-over plan. Independent of the product we were going to upgrade to, during the initial planning we discussed the idea of converting an office at a time or several offices at a time. We looked into the interoffice exchange and use of documents and found that we had a large number of attorneys and staff using documents in offices other than their own and outside of their region. Many practice groups had already distributed workloads between offices to the point where if we decided to upgrade a single office or logical grouping of offices over a weekend and then another logical grouping the next weekend, we would impact the production of several practice groups until the conversion was completed.

Our project plan allowed for four months of preparation and cut-over. Due to the age of the existing DMS servers, we decided to replace them with new servers. This also aided us in the contingency plans. We had to calculate the expected storage required to support the DOCS Open documents on the file servers and the new storage for the documents. Several offices would require additional server storage so those offices were upgraded to new servers. Since the new DMS servers were relatively beefy boxes, we combined indexing into the DMS servers.

Once the new DMS servers were in place we started test conversions of the databases. This was all done across the WAN for all offices. This process was run multiple times to help weed out orphaned and corrupted documents. Checked out documents also failed but that was to be expected. We also used this process to create timing charts to support the conversion weekend. This took several weeks to complete. After successful conversions of each library we decided that we had a very good baseline already available. So we changed our plan of doing a complete conversion on the final weekend to just doing a delta conversion of the documents that were checked out and those yet to be created. This improved our total downtime from the expected 56 hours to less than 32 hours. We set up a conference call for all of the offices to call into to report progress or problems. We had DBAs and network engineers located in the largest offices and had techs on-call if needed to come into the offices. We did not need to bring anyone in. We actually had attorneys back in the offices Sunday morning working in before the rest of the firm came back in Monday morning.

From the desktop perspective, we broke the client installation into three steps.

• Step 1: install the client files onto the desktops three weeks before the cut-over. This installation was basically the files without the registry keys and desktop icons. This gave us time to confirm the installation of the files was complete and we did not miss anyone.
• Step 2: this would happen the morning after the cut-over. Upon login, everyone received a toggle package that would remove the DOCS Open registry keys and icon, install the registry keys and icons and then reboot.
• Step 3: this final step would take place after everyone was running comfortably on WorkSite. We would remove the remaining DOCS Open files and folders. This was also part of the contingency planning. If for some reason that we had to roll back to DOCS Open, we would simply remove/uninstall the toggle package and they would return to the DOCS Open environment. We did not have to use the contingency plan.

7. What type of training was provided during rollout for lawyers and the administrative staff?
Since the firm had been using a DMS for 2 years, we decided to use the demonstration/brown bag format. The sessions were 1 hour in length and we created a flip book as a handout. The flip book provided a quick reference of "if you did this in DOCS Open, you do this in WorkSite." Additional early morning, late evening and weekend sessions were provided for attorneys. All trainers were provided with marketing information for the roll out training. The Monday, Wednesday and Friday before the cut-over we advised everyone to "Check it in" so the number of checked out documents would be reduced. Other documents would be imported as new after the conversion.

8. How has the firm benefited in upgrading to WorkSite?
Improved stability of a three tier system, full text indexing that works, and less than a hand full of lost documents strictly due to remote connections (through dial up or VPN connections) in over two years. We know that when used on the Foley LAN or WAN the system is sound.