Increasing Technology Adoption – Webinar Wrap Up

Last week, we co-hosted a webinar with one of our technology partners, NetDocuments. When we sat down to figure out what corporate legal departments and law firms were struggling with, we turned to the 2017 ILTA Technology Purchasing Survey. ILTA found that their biggest challenges were centered around user adoption and security. While it may be thought that these things are an oxymoron, NetDocuments and SeeUnity know through our work together that they don’t have to be.

We have found that legal professionals are working differently than they were 10, even 5 years ago. We are right at the beginning of a generational change where millennials are going to make up a larger percentage of the workforce than baby boomers and Gen Xers, and this has led to different ways of working. There has also been an increase in social technologies within law firms and corporate legal departments that allow their attorneys to interact differently with their content. These technologies are also fostering more file sharing and collaboration between attorneys and their clients or outside counsel.

Additionally, cyber security and threats to information governance (IG) have also increased over the years. More than ever, data is leaving the firm which causes issues with security and IG. In some cases, attorneys are using unsanctioned file shares to easily collaborate with clients or work on the go. Through our years of experience, we find that this is usually due to a lack of user adoption of DMS.

From the NetDocuments perspective, they have always viewed security and adoption as components that go hand in hand. They have built their solutions around this idea, which has led to a 97% average adoption rate among their users. Their various applications like ndWeb, ndMobile, ndMail, and ndThread aim to provide users a more cohesive user experience. However, there is always going to be a need for additional third-party integrations.

This is where our partnership with NetDocuments comes into play. We provide secure integrations that connect NetDocuments with best-in-class 3^rd party applications like HighQ, Box, SharePoint, and Salesforce. Since our connectors are built at the API level we are able to leverage NetDocuments’ secure platform and extend that into 3^rd party applications. Additionally, our integrations are administrative level, which means you can improve the workflow of your users while still maintaining your information governance initiatives.

SeeUnity provides two products that can help you achieve this goal with NetDocuments. First, our Fusion Content Integration product allows you to securely surface your NetDocuments content within the context of another application like SharePoint or Salesforce. In the webinar, Preston Biermann, Account Manager at SeeUnity, showed an example of a matter-centric approach where a NetDocuments repository is surfaced in SharePoint to show recently edited matters. In this example, a user would have access to their recently edited content, along with native NetDocuments functionality, regarding a particular matter from within SharePoint as their interface of choice.

Second, we have our Echo Content Synchronization. This product is an administrative side tool that can sync your NetDocuments content with different applications. This means that your users can consume the same content from within different applications. It also allows you to share content with clients while still maintaining control over who can see what. It is built to maintain audit trails, thus maintaining your information governance initiatives. Echo allows administrators to sync content based on three different kinds of rulesets: publish, archive, or bi-directional sync. A publish rule allows you to send read-only content from NetDocuments out to a third-party application like Box. Commonly, we see this rule used to allow clients to consume data. The archive rule is just the opposite. You can send content that has been created in a third-party application like SharePoint and archive it into your NetDocuments repository. Last, our true bi-directional rule allows content to reside in both NetDocuments and a third-party application like HighQ. We often see this rule used to ensure that most recent versions are maintained in multiple systems so that users can access and action the most recent version of their content regardless of the application they are using.

In any case, the SeeUnity and NetDocuments partnership is truly aimed at solving the challenges law firms and corporate legal departments face. Where security and user adoption may seem like an oxymoron, they truly do go hand in hand. By extending the NetDocuments platform through the integrations SeeUnity provides, firms can overcome challenges associated with balancing security, usability, and adoption. SeeUnity and NetDocuments encourage you to take your practice into the future by incorporating best-in-class technology and integrations into your strategy!

Watch the Webinar