Nalytics Preserve & Gosschalks

Background

Gosschalks are a leading full service commercial law firm with a client base across the UK. Their clients cover a wide range of sectors and disciplines – from large PLCs to small businesses.

Managing legacy data is often a problem for law firms. It’s usually stored in outdated IT systems often at risk of experiencing poor performance and irreparable breakdowns, which can threaten loss of intellectual property, reputational damage, and diminished client trust.

As legacy IT systems age, not only are they are unable to accommodate today’s security best practices, such as multi-factor authentication, single-sign on and role-based access, but the security risks also increase as they may lack sufficient audit trails or encryption methods.

Challenge

Gosschalks’ challenge was to provide a suitable library for their users to maintain access to important historic documents following the introduction of a new Legal Practice Management System.

To reduce the risks associated with such a process, any new solution for their legacy document library would need to be cost effective, secure, respect document integrity, and would enable fast and simple access for their users.

The firm had previously utilised iManage as their core document management solution. Gosschalks were looking for a robust solution for their legacy documents, without having to maintain all the licenses and hardware required to retain their iManage infrastructure over the coming years.

The business compliance requirement was to preserve and maintain this legacy data as an archive of documents, emails, and attachments, along with all associated metadata.

Gosschalks needed an effective method for achieving this, without the associated cost and overhead involved with maintaining their existing iManage on-premise infrastructure. Their legacy document library, acquired over the last 20 years, had to be accessible to their users for as long as 8 years, post implementation. Gosschalks had accumulated over 8 million documents, which represented nearly a terabyte (TB) of fully indexed data in their iManage system.

Solution

Nalytics Preserve was chosen by Gosschalks as a safe and secure solution for their legacy data.

Developed by Nalanda Technology, Nalytics Preserve provides a secure repository of archived legacy data in an easily searchable cloud-based application.

Steve Savage, Partner – Head of IT and Development at Gosschalks says: –

We were looking for a robust solution for our legacy documents without having to maintain all of the licenses and hardware required to retain our iManage infrastructure over the coming years.

 

Nalytics Preserve provides us with an easy to use, fast and effective way to access and search all our legacy documents, helping us easily find what we need to meet our regulatory requirements, including GDPR, and retention policies.

 

We worked with Nalanda to refine the search process based around our specific requirements. The solution incorporates a bespoke “matter specific” document search interface and this instantly improves the ‘searchability’ of our data from iManage – this significantly helped user adoption and minimised training costs.

Margaret Warrington, Product Manager at Nalanda Technology adds: –

Working closely with Steve and the Gosschalks team enabled us to provide them with an effective solution to easily search, access and manage their legacy data. We wanted to ensure users found the transition as easy as possible, so we refined the Nalytics Preserve solution to reflect how their users previously interacted with iManage.

Result

Nalytics Preserve was rolled out to the entire practice, providing convenient and secure access to more than 8 million documents and a total of 1TB of data.

All documents and their associated metadata are now securely stored and accessed through a single cloud-based service that is seamlessly integrated into their current legal services platform.

The full migration to Nalytics Preserve has enabled Gosschalks to free up significant resources within its VMWare-based environment, which will be utilised to provide additional solutions in the future without the need for further investment in new hardware.

The firm no longer need to spend time managing huge amounts of data within their on-premise environment which was time consuming and costly.

Steve says: –

Nalytics has enabled us to migrate everything into a secure and intuitive environment with almost zero overhead in terms of management time, and at a fraction of the cost.

Nalytics delivers a really neat and intuitive solution to our legacy document needs. Not only has it provided us with an intuitive way to accurately search across historical data, but is has enabled us to make significant savings around infrastructure and data management overheads.

Throughout the development process, the team at Nalanda were superb. They were always willing to listen to our exact needs and constantly delivered ahead of expectations.

There is no doubt that Nalytics helps our lawyers to maintain our high standards of client service and will continue to do so for years to come. Overall, a very solid, capable and reliable solution for our needs and even more so now in this current cloud-based working environment.

Steve adds: –

Technology should add value, complement core values and wrap around the requirements of a business – Nalytics Preserve has done all this for us and more.

Key Outcomes

• Significantly reduced IT infrastructure costs.
• Management of time savings with more focus on client value projects.
• Increased efficiency and productivity around managing legacy data.
• Reduced risk of non-compliance and cyber breach incidents.
• Improved flexible working with a cloud-based solution.