Providing powerful legal matter management using companies’ existing Office 365/SharePoint systems, ES/Unity has found a sweet spot with in-house legal teams, attracting major international clients in the UK, US and UAE
Belfast, October 10th, 2017 – Repstor, the ECM adoption company that helps businesses exploit their SharePoint and Office 365 investments, has reported even greater than anticipated early success for ES /Unity™, the new matter management solution it launched in March in partnership with Eversheds Sutherland, the international law firm.
National Grid, Wellcome Trust, Queen’s University Belfast, and Miral, an asset management company in the UAE, committed to ES /Unity within the first quarter after the product’s launch. A major banking group, a Canadian construction company, and a US multinational biotechnology product development company, are also in advanced discussions about implementing ES /Unity.
Repstor and Eversheds Sutherland have been struck by the scale of some of the planned implementations, having initially assumed small or medium sized companies would be ES/Unity’s main market. “But there is no limit to the product’s scale, and some of these implementations will be rolled out to over a hundred users,” Sheila Gormley, Repstor’s Director of Business Development, said.
A well-known UK transport organisation, two global oil companies, a European car manufacturer and one of the leading mobile operators in the UK are also talking to Eversheds Sutherland and Repstor about using ES /Unity.
“This impressive early success is testimony to the strength and positioning of the product, which makes it a very easy decision for firms, their users and their IT people,” Sheila added.
Introduced to the market at the annual British Legal Technology Forum in March 2017. ES/Unity combines Eversheds Sutherland’s own legal experience with Repstor’s technology expertise in extracting greater value from everyday Microsoft products (Repstor specialises in matter/case and email/document management solutions that work natively within Microsoft Office, Office 365 and SharePoint).
Beyond tangible productivity and efficiency benefits, teams using ES /Unity can continue to work as they always have, and transition to the cloud in a very low-risk way. This means they can work more flexibly and potentially source talent from a wider pool. The software also provides greater transparency and management information, enabling legal teams to demonstrate their value to the business.
The market opportunity for ES /Unity was confirmed by research last year (Raising the bar: Digital technology and the enhancement of legal services – The Looking Glass Report’, Winmark 2016). It found that budget issues, difficulties blending new and existing systems, and a lack of time to absorb change, were significant barriers to improving document management – particularly for in-house legal teams.
“There is no other product of its kind on the market,” Sheila noted. “Until now, in-house legal teams have had to buy specialist matter management solutions on top of their O365 / Microsoft platform investment, which can be costly as well as overkill for the needs of a corporate legal department. ES /Unity is different – it builds on systems that are already in use every day.
“The market response to ES /Unity has surprised us,” she added. “The most common reaction we get to ES /Unity is “It’s too good to be true!” Clearly it’s something teams have been waiting for.”
Repstor and Eversheds Sutherland also plan to target small and medium law firms with ES /Unity. “This is a huge opportunity in its own right, which ES/Unity addresses perfectly. But for the moment, we’re focusing on the pent-up need in the corporate market,” Sheila concluded.