Challenger Law Firm gunnercooke Boosts Cloud-Based Matter Management with Repstor

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Carina Birt
Sarum PR for Repstor
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Almost 200 partners & support staff will use Repstor solutions to facilitate the management & sharing of content from within Microsoft Outlook

March 3rd, 2017 - gunnercooke llp, one of the UK’s fastest-growing challenger law firms, has rolled out Repstor’s email and content management suite to almost 200 fee earners and support personnel across its nationwide legal practice, to extend the benefits of Office 365 and make it easier to share and access content from within Outlook.

gunnercooke provides corporate and commercial legal services to businesses, banks and investors. The firm has expanded rapidly from inception, growing from 10 to 125 partners over the last five years, with the business projected to double in size across 2017. The firm operates nationally from offices in London and Manchester which support hot-desking, though partners are enabled to work remotely, from client offices or from home. It is a committed user of the cloud – in particular Office 365 – to encourage easy collaboration between team members and clients.

As the natural next step, gunnercooke wanted to make it easier for colleagues to securely manage and share email correspondence relating to client matters, to ensure everyone had access to the latest updates and that accurate records were being kept.

Repstor specialises in providing intuitive access to Office 365, SharePoint and other content systems, natively from within Microsoft Outlook. gunnercooke came across the company at last year’s British Legal Technology Forum in London. “It was the holy grail,” says James Williams, gunnercooke’s systems manager. “We’ve been very happy with Office 365 and are using SharePoint Online, but off the shelf SharePoint isn’t great with emails,” he explains. “You can end up with division between SharePoint documents and those being circulated via email.”

Initially, gunnercooke has deployed Repstor’s affinity™, assist™ and drive™ solutions, which together will allow users to easily and intuitively manage all of their content sources from within their familiar, existing Outlook environment. “It was all configured very quickly, and will be used by all partners, the administration team and our legal counsel (other lawyers who work on a project by project basis for gunnercooke partners),” James says. In total over 190 people will use Repstor’s software.

In due course gunnercooke may also implement Repstor custodian for legal™, which provides more advanced matter management from within Outlook, he adds – through the ability to apply structure, metadata, workflow processes and policy to document or ‘matter’ types.

Although there are other ‘email-friendly’ document management systems on the market, these are typically expensive and require disruptive migration, James notes. “With Repstor’s products, we could do what we needed to very affordably and without any changes to the set-up we already had. It’s all very easy and seamless to use, and that’s very important because if a system is hard to use people will avoid it or find their own ways of doing things, resulting in compliance issues.”

gunnercooke has just gone live with the Repstor products, and expects these to make life much easier for fee earners. “Our job in IT systems is to provide the best possible back-office experience and service to our partners for the budget allocated. Repstor’s content management tools will make a big difference, and support our continued rapid growth plans,” James says.

As well as getting ‘great value for money’, gunnercooke has found working with Repstor a very positive experience, he adds. “They’re a really nice company – everyone’s very friendly, they’re extremely responsive and they’ve been very flexible on timings. It’s been a pleasure.”

Repstor is exhibiting at the British Legal Technology Forum on March 14th at Old Billingsgate, London. Visit us on stand A2, next to the wine bar on the ground floor.

About gunnercooke

gunnercooke is one of the UK’s leading new model corporate and commercial law firms, established to challenge, improve and evolve the way that legal services are delivered to businesses. At present the Firm comprises 125 partners across London and Manchester offices, practicing via a fixed and certain fee model, without time recording.

All gunnercooke partners have over 10,000 hours practicing experience, and the majority have spent time in business or in house, learning commerciality first hand. The Business has an ambitious growth strategy, seeking to recruit further senior, quality lawyers from leading firms and counsel. More at www.gunnercooke.com

About Repstor

Founded in 2011 and headquartered in Belfast, Repstor helps companies exploit their SharePoint and Office365 investments. Repstors’ founders have deep heritage and experience in Microsoft and ECM technologies uniquely equipping them to deliver world-class integration technologies that transform user adoption and acceptance of SharePoint and other content stores.

Repstor’s custodian for legal™, the matter management solution for Law firms and Legal departments, is used worldwide by firms and companies including Eversheds Sutherland, gunnercooke & KANA . More at www.repstor.com and on twitter @Repstor1.