A draft saved to the desktop
A fee earner uses your product to review a lease and produce a report. The report downloads to their laptop. To file it, they have to open the firm's document management system, find the matter workspace, upload the file, and fill in the profile: document type, author, client and matter number. Some do. Some leave the report in their downloads folder or attach it to an email. A month later, the supervising partner cannot find the report in the matter file.
The firm's IT and risk teams notice. Their policy is that everything about a matter lives in the workspace. Your product is now the reason documents are escaping it.
Why a download button is not enough
Law firms that use iManage or NetDocuments treat the matter workspace as the official record. It carries the profile, the version history and the access controls, including restrictions on who can see a matter. Anything saved outside it is invisible to the rest of the team and outside the firm's controls.
- Your product downloads files, leaving filing to the fee earner.
- Documents are uploaded into your product by drag and drop, so there is no link back to the version they came from.
- Profile fields such as document type and author are left blank or guessed.
- Your product's own copies of documents sit outside the firm's retention and access rules.
- The firm's security settings on a workspace are not reflected in your product.
What a missing integration costs
Firms with strong records policies may simply refuse to roll out a product that does not file into their document management system. Those that do roll it out see documents scattered across laptops and inboxes, which undermines the matter file and creates risk when a fee earner leaves. For you, it becomes a recurring objection in sales and a recurring complaint after sale.
There is also a confidentiality risk. If your product lets a user open or save documents on a matter they are barred from in the document management system, it has bypassed the firm's controls, which is exactly what their risk team is looking for.
How we build document management integration
What we build connects your product to the matter workspace, so documents are opened from it and saved back to it.
- Connection to iManage Work or NetDocuments through their APIs, authenticated as the user so the firm's access controls apply to every read and write.
- A document picker inside your product that browses the user's matters and workspaces, so documents are opened from the official version rather than uploaded from a desktop.
- Save-back of outputs to the right workspace and folder, as a new document or a new version, with the profile filled in: document type, author, client and matter, according to firm rules.
- Filing rules per firm held in configuration, such as which folder a report goes to and which document type it gets.
- A save log recording every document read and written, with user, time and matter, available to the firm.
- Handling of restricted matters, so your product never shows or stores content from a workspace the user cannot access.
| Step | Without integration | With integration |
|---|---|---|
| Open a document | Download, then upload to your product | Pick from the matter workspace |
| Save an output | Download to laptop | Saved to the workspace with profile |
| Access rules | Your product's own | The firm's own, applied on every call |
| Version history | Lost | Kept in the document management system |
| Audit | None | Save log per matter |
API access to these systems usually requires the firm's approval and sometimes a partner arrangement with the vendor. We tell you what is needed for each, and build within the access you have.
The lease report, filed properly
The fee earner opens your product, picks the lease from the matter workspace, and runs the review. When they click save, the report goes into the matter's reports folder with the document type, author and matter filled in. The supervising partner finds it in the workspace alongside the lease. The firm's risk team can see from the save log which documents your product read and wrote, and nothing is sitting on anyone's laptop.
Checklist: are documents escaping the matter file?
- Your product's outputs are downloaded rather than saved to a workspace.
- Users upload documents from their desktop instead of opening from the matter.
- Profile fields on saved documents are often blank.
- Your product does not check the firm's access controls on each document.
- Firms raise document filing as a blocker in sales.