Eisenhower and Carlson PLLC

Law Firm Leverages Intellectual Capital with New Document Management System

Founded in 1914 by the older brother of U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Eisenhower & Carlson PLLC (E&C) is one of the oldest law firms in Washington state. With offices in Seattle and Tacoma, the firm’s 30 attorneys practice in areas ranging from banking and finance to litigation to business, family, and real estate law.

Their work generates thousands of documents. The lawyers, paralegals, and legal assistants frequently need to create new documents for specific client situations. They also customize and resave forms, letters, and other documents originally authored by colleagues. In the process, E&C has accumulated an electronic library of more than 350,000 documents.

The Challenge

Eisenhower & Carlson’s proprietary document management system sat on top of Microsoft Word. When a user clicked to save a Word document, the DMS provided a user interface with fields where the user would enter information relevant to the document, such as the client’s name and other document attributes. It also assigned a document number, provided a uniform naming convention, and saved the file to the office network, which was backed up nightly.

“The big weakness of the system,” says Brad Fresia, Managing Partner of the Seattle office, “was that this library of documents that we’ve built represented a huge amount of intellectual capital for our firm, but we weren’t able to leverage it.”

Unfortunately the users couldn’t search the system in ways that were useful. There were limits to the type of data that it captured. Users were inconsistent in how they completed the data fields. The system could efficiently search only a single field with each search request rather than search across multiple fields.

The biggest problem was that all the documents generated by each office were saved in a single directory—with about 65,000 files in the Seattle office directory and 285,000 in the Tacoma directory by early 2002. A single search could take a minute or more. When users clicked one of the search results to view it, there was no direct way to return to the list of results and preview the next hit. If users discovered they needed a different document, they had to initiate the same search again. In addition, attaching documents to an e-mail message was cumbersome. Only one file could be attached at a time, and each attempt to attach another file required accessing the entire directory of files.

Collaboration and workflow were disrupted in other ways as well. Seattle and Tacoma users technically were able to access documents stored in both locations. But in order for users in Seattle to access Tacoma documents, they had to switch from their network to Tacoma’s network—they couldn’t simultaneously search both repositories.

The Solution

To address these issues, Eisenhower & Carlson looked to Resolute to review its document management situation and find a way for the firm to make remote access a reality. When Fresia outlined E&C’s challenges and needs, Resolute Project Manager Mark Massad thought immediately of Microsoft SharePoint® Portal Server as the answer.

“SharePoint Portal Server was the obvious choice from the beginning,” says Massad. “We have enough experience with SharePoint Portal Server to know that it’s malleable. It gave us the tools we needed to transition E&C’s existing information assets.”