King & Wood Mallesons SJ Berwin Chooses HotDocs

Global News

24
Oct
2014

Editor

Global law firm, King & Wood Mallesons SJ Berwin has implemented HotDocs in offices across Europe and the Middle East, enabling access to the leading automated document generation software for 1,150 members of staff.

The King & Wood Mallesons network is one of the top 25 law firms in the world, with more than 2,700 lawyers, including over 550 partners in more than 30 locations across the world comprising China, Hong Kong, Australia, the United Kingdom, continental Europe, the Middle East, Japan and the US. The combined firms use the name King & Wood Mallesons globally and King & Wood Mallesons SJ Berwin in the UK, Continental Europe and the Middle East. 

Following a competitive tender between four companies, HotDocs was selected based on quality of software, expertise of consulting team and value for money.

Terry Ponsford, Document Automation Analyst at King & Wood Mallesons SJ Berwin, said:  “We had a requirement to replace an outdated document assembly system and we thoroughly assessed the market before approaching the four companies that we deemed suitable for our purposes.  During evaluation, which included trialling the software, HotDocs shone through as the best fit for our vision in terms of software quality and understanding of what was required.”

King & Wood Mallesons SJ Berwin is utilising HotDocs to migrate from a desktop to server environment for digital drafting, allowing increased integration with other in-house systems.  The firm’s previous solution already integrated with Tikit’s template management system and the implementation of HotDocs Server enabled further integration with WorkSite, the document management system.  Both of these integrations with HotDocs have been honed to the point of high-level document delivery, ensuring user confidence has been maintained during the transition.  In an average year, offices in London, Brussels, Luxembourg, Paris, Frankfurt, Munich, Madrid, Milan, Dubai and Riyadh will execute more than 8,000 document assemblies, with usage expected to rise as requests for new applications are fulfilled.

HotDocs is widely used within a number of different practice areas in the firm, including Real Estate, Litigation, Employment, Corporate Finance and the EU, Competition and Regulatory practice, with other practice areas showing interest in adopting HotDocs technology within their own departments to save time and money when drafting documents – for client and non-client use.  King & Wood Mallesons SJ Berwin has a philosophy of supporting their lawyers’ productivity via long term usage of document assembly software.   The seamless transition from the incumbent system to HotDocs has ensured users could begin to maximise on use of HotDocs and the new integration with WorkSite without disruption.

Terry Lawley, Business Innovation Team Manager at King & Wood Mallesons SJ Berwin, commented:  “With HotDocs, we have absolute confidence in the product and in the support services that surround it.  The changeover of software has had minimal impact, almost unnoticeable, on our internal client base.  Our team is pretty seasoned when it comes to document automation, as they’ve been using it for some time, so we were delighted when demonstrating HotDocs to a meeting of our professional support lawyers that they were wowed by its capabilities – it clearly went over and above their expectations.”

Gary Eunson, Commercial Director at HotDocs, concluded:  “It has been fantastic to work with a law firm that puts document assembly at the very heart of business innovation and can so clearly see the benefits of HotDocs in terms of productivity, efficiency and integration capability.  HotDocs ultimate selection from a pool of four software vendors clearly demonstrates our position as market leader for automated document generation and underlines our domain expertise within the legal sector.”