Associate Announcement: Taylor Vinters plot their path to success with new integrated IT solution

By DPS

With offices in London, Cambridge and Singapore, regional firm of solicitors Taylor Vinters operates in the areas of technology, investment and private client, serving an international client base of private individuals, fast-growth companies, multinational, investors and non-profits.

The firm are an existing user of iManage for their document management needs. iManage from Autonomy is highly used amongst the top 100 firms in the UK and very heavily used in the USA market where document management solutions are arguably more popular than case management software.

When Steve Sumner, IT director, and Drew Winlaw, director of operational development at Taylor Vinters, looked at their firm's business needs they knew that neither a document management nor a case management software product fitted their requirements fully. They realised that the firm needed a document management solution for the business as a whole and a case management one for certain areas only.

Taylor Vinters were already users of DPS's case management software for the Plot Sales department and although this worked well, they needed to link this department to the rest of the business.

The Plot Sales department was using a fairly old version of DPS and needed to upgrade to the newer, Outlook Office case management system which is completely integrated with Outlook. This model also suited the iManage integration since iManage is also provided within Outlook. The integration between the two products meant that everything was embedded into their Outlook desktop.

The missing link was getting accounts information right into the case management system so that relevant financial information could be delivered right into the case.

Steve and Drew approached DPS and specified how the integration to their iManage system was to work. This had to be completely seamless and any document created by DPS's case management software had to be accessed in the normal way but checked into iManage automatically, without any user's intervention. Of course, if an iManage user checked a document into the case directly through iManage and outside of DPS, then DPS would need to synchronise the case automatically.

The task was particularly difficult but the benefits for the end user were also considerable. DPS enlisted the iManage expertise of Dr Mo Barkhordar at Mocom Systems to develop a module within their case management software that would meet the clients' requirements and the project specified.

A completely new Plot Sales module was written internally by Taylor Vinters' staff trained in DPS and the updated Outlook Office case management completely integrated to iManage and their Miles 33 accounts was rolled out in June 2014.

Steve Sumner said, "This is more than an integration project - we actually did not want one to happen- we did not want our staff to have to think which software they are in. What we wanted was for them to do their work and all the 'merging' and integration of systems to be done in the background. The most successful integration is when users don't even know it has happened and that is what we have achieved."

Drew Winlaw added, "We knew what we wanted- iManage document management for the business as a whole and the DPS case management system that could be customised to our own requirements. After only 6 months from the project's implementation, we are reaping the benefits and are already looking to put our Conveyancing department onto our DPS/iManage solution.''

Osman Ismail, managing director at DPS commented on the news:''We are always keen to work on integration projects to deliver client benefits. This project was particularly challenging because both products are embedded into Outlook and we needed to make the meshing and product join invisible points. It was very challenging to do but very rewarding now that it is done. We are aiming to provide the merged DPS case management and iManage module to other iManage users, simply because it is so well integrated and it provides so much extra functionality to the iManage software. ''

More information about Taylor Vinters can be found on their website- www.taylorvinters.com

DPS Software are committed to developing IT solutions that meet the specific and changing needs of law firms and their DPSCloud hosted solutions have helped them to become a realistic ‘one stop shop’ for the IT needs of the modern firm. Learn more about the company and its services at www.dpssoftware.co.uk.