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Independent law firm Farrer & Co has installed a cloud-based Software as a Service EDMS from NetDocuments along with high volume Kodak i3000 Series Scanners and Kodak Capture Pro Software, provided by partner, ITEC.

Founded in 1701, Farrer & Co has a rich 300-year plus history advising clients on legal matters with the business today split into four practice areas: private client, contentious, property, and commercial. The company has offices in Lincoln's Inn Fields and employs over 400 staff.

Neil Davison, Farrer & Co's IT Director, says, "Law firms are document heavy and traditionally produce vast amounts of paper which has to be retained for a significant number of years, depending on the specific records management policy. With the growth in email usage, our paper storage has been growing year on year which is cumbersome to manage."

Farrer & Co has used MFPs for a long time for scanning but required equipment to complement this which could handle the much greater volumes expected as it scans inbound paperwork about legal matters to populate NetDocuments - bundles which can run into several hundred pages each. The purchase of two Kodak i3450 Scanners does this perfectly as each are rated to process up to 20,000 documents per day - 90 pages per minute - and come with Perfect Page technology to guarantee image quality even when dealing with old and faded paper.

Davison says, "Having something which is reliable, doesn't jam, can cope with all paper formats and won't damage valuable documents some of which are decades and even centuries old is crucial. The quality of the Kodak Alaris equipment stood out to us straight away."

The scanners are managed and operated by a third party managed service provider, Intelligent Office, as part of an outsourced facilities and office services contract. An initial pilot project was carried out in the HR department to review how high volume scanning would work. All personnel paperwork was scanned over a 10 week period given the structure of each is similar to legal files. All HR files are now totally digitised. The success of this meant that the roll-out was broadened to all Farrer & Co's legal teams.

Now, one year after NetDocuments was installed, the project has been declared a success. In contrast to the old EDMS which presented documents as long lists, NetDocuments has an attractive GUI, is therefore very visual and allows information to be found within a few clicks.

Furthermore, using a true SaaS cloud-based solution saves Farrer & Co money on IT infrastructure costs as well removing the necessity to manage a complex on-premise IT environment - freeing staff to focus on work considered more strategic. The shift from paper to digital is also allowing Farrer & Co to look at the volume of paper held on floors, as well as reducing the external offsite storage used.

Simon Pring, a partner and member of the management board at Farrer & Co commented, "Such is the importance of a document management system, a project like this could have meant significant disruption if solicitors couldn't access or send documents to clients. I'm just so pleased that the move to NetDocuments and the other IT related work streams went so well, and it was business as normal."
More info: www.kodakalaris.com