Speaker 1: If your law firm is considering NetDocuments, then this video is for you. Coming up, we're going to cover NetDocuments features, advantages, trade-offs, and alternatives. I'm Dennis Dimko with Uptime Legal, and today we're doing an honest review of NetDocuments for law firms. Okay, for context, I'll give a quick intro on who we are because our background and our experience as a company is really where the content of this review comes from. So, we are Uptime Legal Systems. We are a leading legal technology company, and among other things, we help law firms select and implement legal software. We do that for all kinds of legal software. We do it for practice management software, we do it with accounting software, and we do it, of course, for document management software. And as a byproduct of that, we've been involved in the selection and the implementation and the support thereafter of many different software products for literally hundreds and hundreds of law firms. So, today's review of NetDocuments is really an aggregate of all of our combined experiences, as well as the feedback and experiences of many, many law firms that we've worked with. Okay, here's what we're going to cover today. We're going to cover NetDocuments overview and highlights at 100,000 feet. We'll drill into the specific features of NetDocuments. We'll talk about pricing and implementation for NetDocuments. We'll talk pros and cons. We'll talk the advantages or potential advantages of NetDocuments for your law firm. And then we'll talk about some of the drawbacks or some of the trade-offs of NetDocuments potentially in your law firm. And then finally, we'll talk about potential alternatives to NetDocuments for your law firm. Let's get started. Okay, let's start with a high-level overview. NetDocuments was, to its credit, one of the first cloud-based document management systems, certainly one of the first mainstream ones. And today, it's used by many different industries. It's certainly used by law firms. It's also used by accounting firms, as well as the manufacturing industry, financial services, medical, and a few other industries. Highlights, NetDocuments is cloud-based. Obviously, it's in the name. That means there is no server required and the data is hosted off-site. NetDocuments has a variety of add-ins for Office and other applications. The add-in for the Microsoft Office Suite, they call NDOffice. There's also NDMail, which is their add-in for Outlook, as well as NDSync to sync certain documents off-site or offline. NetDocuments is sold and implemented not by the company, NetDocuments, but by a third-party authorized consultant, which I'll talk a little bit about more later. NetDocuments is compatible with Windows, but not with Macs. That's an important point, and I'll unpack that one in a little more detail as well shortly. And generally, those are the highlights. Those are the high-level what you need to know about NetDocuments. Okay, next, let's talk specific features. We'll cover the core features that NetDocuments has, as well as some of the features that it does not have that either other products do have, or that are just features that perhaps your firm needs that is missing in NetDocuments. Starting with the basics, document storage. NetDocuments includes, of course, basic inline storage for all types of files. We use the term documents, but really you can store Word documents, Excel files, PDF, as well as other kinds of files like video files, audio files, and all of those live inside of the system, inside of NetDocuments. Another feature is, of course, that NetDocuments is natively cloud-based, which means it does not require on-premise servers. The system lives off-site, which means no service to maintain, minimal IT management. Organization is a feature of many document management systems, and every DMS does it a little different. NetDocuments organizes things via what they call a workspace. So, a workspace is a top-level container that you can store information in. In NetDocuments, there's no such thing as a client or a matter, but you can create workspaces to sort of emulate a matter or perhaps a practice area within your firm, and I'll talk a little bit more about that later. NetDocuments also has strong Microsoft Office integration. It has, specifically, it has add-ins for Microsoft Word, as well as Outlook and some of the other Office apps. And as sort of a sub-bullet to that, NetDocuments has good email management. With their Outlook add-in, which again they call EndEmail, you can save an email to a matter much the same way you would a document. In fact, within NetDocuments, it becomes a document like any other alongside your Word or your PDF documents for that particular matter. Another feature, another strong feature of NetDocuments is it has good full-text search. That gives you the ability to search across everything in the system. So, searching all of the text, all of the content in every document, as well as search across emails and some of the metadata that you may have entered in those documents. For a lot of law firms, they don't, not every law firm uses every feature of a DMS. In fact, that's pretty common. But for a lot of law firms, search alone is the main reason they got a DMS. It's the primary reason they move from, say, a basic file system to a DMS like NetDocuments. And document version management. This one is definitely a key tenant of a DMS like NetDocuments. So, in NetDocuments, you can maintain multiple versions of a document and then you can go back and look at prior versions of a document. As opposed to what we see law firms do without a system like this is they'll make multiple copies of a document and call each one, you know, dash V2, dash V3, so on and so forth. Unique document ID is another feature. In NetDocuments, as with other DMS products, every document that you save into the system gets a unique ID that never changes. No matter what happens to the document, if you move it, if you rename it, that ID stays the same. And another feature of NetDocuments is tagging and profiling, which gives you the ability to code and classify and categorize documents within each project or within each matter. NetDocuments also has a client portal or sharing feature, which means that it provides a means for you to share documents securely with outside parties. So, think customers, think other attorneys, think of counsel attorneys, opposing counsel, that kind of thing. Now, on the subject of a feature that NetDocuments does not have, NetDocuments, again, does not have any concept or organization around clients and matters. Again, there's no such thing. NetDocuments, as I mentioned, uses workspaces, which you will have to sort of arrange and fit to mimic a matter or a client sort of structure. NetDocuments does have user and group permissions, which gives you the ability to grant or deny access to certain folders or certain workspaces within your firm. In terms of other features, NetDocuments is 100% Windows compatible. It works on a Windows machine with no issues. But as I mentioned, it is not Mac compatible. It will not run, NetDocuments will not run natively on a Mac computer, which I will touch on more later. In the realm of security, data encryption, NetDocuments does encrypt all data, both in transit and at rest, which is good to know, absolutely worth mentioning. But I'll say at this point, that's sort of a standard that you should expect from really any cloud-based DMS. And also in the subject of security, NetDocuments supports multi-factor authentication or MFA for additional security. NetDocuments also provides geographic data redundancy, which means that data you store in NetDocuments is automatically backed up to not only different servers, but different servers in different data centers in different geographic locations across the U.S. So that might be, for instance, one data center in the East Coast, one in the West Coast. However, NetDocuments does not provide company-provided onboarding. Again, what I mean is if you purchase NetDocuments, the company NetDocuments doesn't do the onboarding. They don't do the data migration or the training. I will touch on that more later. I know I keep saying that, but I'll unpack some of these other issues, some of these key issues in just a little bit. And in terms of storage, the default storage, at least as of the recording of this video, is each user in your firm gets one gigabyte of storage or a total pool equal to that. And you can, of course, add more for an additional fee. Okay, we've talked features. Let's talk pricing. Unfortunately, NetDocuments does not provide pricing for their software publicly, not on their website or any other public forum. It seems they want you to call them. Which brings me to the onboarding process. I've touched on this a few times, so I'll finally get to the point on this one. NetDocuments, the company, does not provide the onboarding for their software. So if you purchase NetDocuments, what they'll do is they'll assign you to a local reseller. They call them an authorized consultant, and that's a totally separate company. And that consultant is responsible for all of the onboarding. So data migration, setting up the application and the add-ons in your individual computers, and training your firm. Now, here's the thing with that. All of that, data migration, setup, training, those are critical. Make or break functions. And if they go poorly, it will forever or for a long time affect and undermine your use of your new document management system. These are make or break functions. Now, we have hundreds of law firms as clients, and some of them have been through this process. So we've, over the years, had an opportunity to hear some of the feedback. And in fairness, some firms said, yeah, the process went fine. But we've definitely heard numerous times issues, feedback that was more mixed. In some cases or in one case, a law firm shared with us that the data didn't quite come over right. And once it was in, it was tough to do anything about that. Another firm that we worked with said that for the training portion, the consultant that was there to train their firm didn't really seem to know that much about the product. In fact, I think this particular law firm said, boy, Dennis, I feel like I knew more about the product than they did. And in each of these cases, when the law firm would say, reach out to NetDocuments, the company to voice some of these concerns and express that they weren't thrilled with the process, the answer was, and I'm paraphrasing, sorry, that's not us. That's a separate company. So we think that we at Uptime Legal, we think that sort of thing creates a real disconnect and accountability. And we think that's a mistake. So that's pricing and implementation for NetDocuments. Next, let's talk general pros and cons. And we'll start with the advantages of NetDocuments. What are the advantages of implementing NetDocuments for the typical law firm? This is going to be a review or kind of a repeat of some of the stuff we've always covered. But if we're putting together a pro and con list, here they are. Number one, NetDocuments is cloud-based again, which again means no servers to maintain, minimal IT headaches, no software to update on servers or on desktops except the add-ins. And of course, the data is stored on the NetDocuments servers, which I think we can presume has a high level of security. Advantage number two, NetDocuments is definitely better than basic files and folders or better than a basic file system like an on-premise server. So if your firm is currently using something like the G drive or the S drive, NetDocuments will certainly be an upgrade over that. Basic file systems, again, like file servers, the G drive, the S drive, they lack all the tools that comes with a DMS like NetDocuments, like full-text search, checkout, check-in, email management, things like that. And advantage number three, sort of similar but different, NetDocuments is definitely better than what we call simple cloud storage or basic cloud storage. So if your law firm is maybe smaller and if you're coming from something like a Dropbox or a OneDrive or a Google Drive, NetDocuments is definitely going to seem like and be an upgrade from that. DMSs like NetDocuments have more business class features than these basic cloud apps. All of the features we really covered earlier, again, full-text search, document tagging, and all of the other features that we covered at the beginning of this review. So those are some key advantages of implementing NetDocuments for your law firm. Now let's talk disadvantages. What are the potential trade-offs of NetDocuments for your law firm? Well, I've now mentioned this several times, but of course, no native macOS support. And there's often confusion around this point. Again, a lot of the material and content for this review comes from our experience working closely with law firms, many, many law firms that have implemented all kinds of products, including NetDocuments. And I've talked to definitely a few, personally talked to a few law firms that they were told that NetDocuments will work on a Mac. They informed NetDocuments that they're either partially Mac or all Mac, and they were told, no problem, it'll work great. Only to find out post-implementation or during implementation that what they mean by it works on a Mac is it works on a Mac with Parallels. And if you're not familiar, Parallels is special software that you can run on your Mac computer that runs a complete, we call it a virtual machine, a complete Windows install on your Mac. So basically, you have a full Windows install running on your Mac computer, and you switch back and forth between your Mac and your Windows machine to use Windows-based software. And running software in a Windows virtual machine on your Mac is not the same thing as running software right on your Mac. So needless to say, that law firm and a few others that we've spoken with felt misled. So that's one big trade-off. If you use Macs, maybe you use Macs across your entire firm, maybe you just use them at home, but if you do, it's a serious consideration. Another disadvantage is one I've already talked about, which is, again, that the entire implementation process is effectively outsourced to a third party, to, again, a local consultant. That might be a consultant company, or that might be just a solo consultant who just does this kind of work. And again, feedback is mixed on that. Another trade-off that I've also mentioned a few times is really no concept of clients and matters, no client matter structure. Because, as I mentioned at the top of this review, NetDocuments is made for and used by a variety of different industries, there's no such thing as a matter. Now you can structure your workspaces to sort of simulate that, but I think it'll feel at least somewhat retrofit, right? You can't give a workspace properties that a matter would have, like an actual matter has some properties, it has attorneys it's assigned to, it has maybe a case type or a practice area type, things like that, that you just can't assign to a workspace in NetDocuments. For some law firms, that may not be a big deal. For some law firms, it might be a bigger deal. Another trade-off in our view is non-transparent pricing. Pricing across the board for NetDocuments, I think is obfuscated, maybe not intentional, but from buyers in a few ways. Again, they don't publish their pricing online, and the onboarding process is a big part of the total cost to implement NetDocuments. And since that's provided by a third party, that means it's quoted by a third party. So because of that, all in, it's really difficult to know what your costs will be going into it. And another trade-off is around some of the other technology essentials that sort of live part and parcel with your DMS, like NetDocuments. And that is no options for office exchange and IT support. Here's what I mean. So NetDocuments is compatible with and will work with Office 365. However, the company, NetDocuments, they of course support their own product, but they won't support these other things, these other technology elements like 365, meaning they won't provide support for Office 365 or for IT stuff in general, which means if ever that stuff doesn't work or is having problems, maybe problems talking to NetDocuments, it's kind of on you or you'll have to find an IT person to help you get that up and running. And in our experience, many law firms don't like that sort of disjointed support, that disjointed accountability. They'd rather get a DMS and say Office 365 and some of their other IT essentials from one company. I think they appreciate the single point of accountability and the lack of finger pointing that you would otherwise see in that kind of a setup. All right, there you have it. We've covered the features and the advantages and the potential disadvantages of NetDocuments for your law firm. Whether or not NetDocuments is going to be a good fit for your law firm is, of course, up to you. And it's really case by case. It's really going to come down to the specific features that are must haves and the would like to haves, whether or not you use Macs, things like that. So in any case, I hope this review and this background gives you guys good intel to make the right decision for your law firm. So finally, if you do decide that you want to look at alternatives to NetDocuments, here are really the top three legal document management products used by law firms today in addition to NetDocuments. Starting with our own Lex Workplace. So Lex Workplace is cloud-based law firm centric document and email management. The structure is everything's organized by optionally client and then matter. And then within a matter, you can have folders and subfolders from there. And within each matter, you have really the full robust document management set of tools. So everything from, again, full text search to version management, to secure external sharing, document tagging and profiling, really the fullest by and large. And Lex Workplace is 100% natively compatible with Windows and Macs. Another popular alternative to NetDocuments is WorldDocs. WorldDocs is a long-standing DMS. It's been around a long time. It's used by a lot of law firms today, so certainly very popular. WorldDocs is largely premise-based document management, meaning it needs to run on a server on-site or in a hosted environment. And the caveat to WorldDocs is that it was, the company WorldDocs, was recently acquired by NetDocuments. So it's fair to say there's a little bit of uncertainty around the future of WorldDocs as a product. And finally, the third popular alternative to NetDocuments is iManage Work, which you'll hear referred to casually as just iManage. iManage is also a long-standing document management product. It has both a on-premise version and a hosted version. It is, if I had to summarize iManage, I would say it's very powerful, very, very powerful, but also requires a lot. It's expensive to buy the software, relatively speaking. It's expensive to implement in that it requires a lot of powerful server infrastructure. It's very unlikely that your existing servers, as they are today, will run it. We almost always see an upgrade needed. So because of all those reasons, both those pros and those cons, we see iManage used typically within law firms that are 50 people, so that includes attorneys and support staff, 50 people or larger. Rarely do we see iManage implemented in firms that are smaller than that. On a closing note, if you'd like to learn more about these document management products that we covered, including NetDocuments, I recommend our legal DMS comparison chart. In this chart, you can see these and a few other document management systems side-by-side, feature-by-feature, so a great tool if you're researching products right now. You can download that chart at our website at lexworkplace.com forward slash DMS chart. I'll put a link in the description. So there you have it. I hope you all found this NetDocuments review useful. I'm Dennis Dimka with Uptime Legal, Onward and Upward.