Keno Kozie Associates is one of SeeUnity’s newest reseller partners, located in Chicago, Illinois. They were an important part of Wilkes Artis’ successful migration to the iManage Cloud. (See below)

How was Keno Kozie started?

Keno Kozie was started 30 years ago in Northfield, Illinois by Barry Keno. One year later, Jay Kozie joined the team, and it was Keno Kozie officially after that. The business started in a spare office, using borrowed equipment and one computer. It was very modest, but it met our needs at the time. Now Keno Kozie has grown to over 300 employees and services hundreds of law firms throughout the world.

The company just celebrated its 30th anniversary last year, how has it evolved?

One word: Growth! As the industry has evolved, Keno Kozie has changed to keep pace. We’ve added many services, built a larger and more diverse professional staff, and continued to strive to be a leader in the industry. Additionally, security has become one of the driving factors in the use of technology everywhere but especially within law firms. Dealing with sensitive client data requires very strong security systems and processes.

What’s on the roadmap for Keno Kozie in 2019-20?

Continued growth in cloud services leveraging advanced technologies to improve both the economic and productivity goals of organizations we work with. One size does not fit all, so our task is to work with our clients and potential clients to ensure that whatever technologies are available solve and/or evolve using the use of technology overall.

From your perspective, how do you see the legal tech industry evolving with the increase of firms moving to the cloud?

The road warrior mentality is prevalent in today’s legal vertical. The legal industry is evolving, and as such, law firms are adopting new technologies at an increasing rate. Studies show that law firms that have changed their approaches to staffing, service delivery, and pricing models are consistently likely to see improved gross revenue.

In addition, the billable hour mentality, the structure of law firms themselves, management being dispersed, long sales cycles, the need to integrate new solution with existing systems, and security concerns continue to be an impediment for legal tech companies. Furthermore, just the pressure from clients to have a more transparent, efficient, and affordable legal system is sure to continue to influence more and more legal practices to improve their operational systems and their methods of delivering legal services.

What is your company’s unique approach to migrations? What advice would you give to an organization looking to migrate to the cloud?

Migration isn’t a one-size-fits-all process, so there are always challenges. Experienced third-party vendors and tools exist to help conquer those challenges. It’s much easier to pull off a successful migration when you’re not reinventing the wheel.

Working with an outside provider that has done migrations to the cloud, specifically in law firms, is the best way to make the process less daunting. An experienced vendor can help move data while shifting new processes and structures in place that make sense with the amount of data you have to shift. Larger amounts of data will take much longer to migrate, so it’s important to have the right strategies and methodologies to ensure that your on-premise data matches your data at various checkpoints along the way.

Migration is not just about making a move to the cloud but also offers a great opportunity to look for ways to gain efficiencies and make effective use of your data and processes. Having a strategy and knowing your high-level goals are key to accomplishing a successful migration and getting the most of a cloud-based document management system.

Recently, Keno Kozie successfully migrated Wilkes Artis’ content from iManage on-premise to the iManage Cloud, using SeeUnity’s Velocity Content Migration product. Tell us about the project and the key benefits of using Velocity.

The project entailed moving over 400,000 documents and multiple containers with a reorganization of data and structure. The firm made the decision to migrate to the iManage Cloud with the core goal of improving attorneys’ ability to work productively and security to remain competitive. The Velocity tool presented an opportunity to uplift the data from on-premises to the iManage Cloud with the benefit of having a ‘fresh’ database starting point with no bloat – it was data cleanup with minimal user impact.

What do you want people to know about the Keno Kozie/SeeUnity partnership?

Both the Keno Kozie and SeeUnity teams worked collaboratively and effectively to provide excellence of service with an end result of success. Not all partnerships work in the same manner, but when we find a partner that values teamwork with the client’s success in mind, this is a win-win for us.

For more information about the Keno Kozie/SeeUnity partnership, visit our Partners page.