Aderant Handshake vs. iManage Work

The user of Handshake takes a certain amount of user computer literacy and the user needs to be resourceful. When building our site, I needed to google quite a bit. On the contrary, if budget allows, Handshake developers will do it all for you.

Incentivized

Legal team using this product helps the team to better access documents securely within their email app (Outlook) and the user experience to control the document is excellent and being able to make it private and isolate confidential documents during a court session is very important and iManage has met our requirements. Also, being able to access instantly from users' workstation/laptop devices is very important and iManage plugin for outlook has satisfied our Business requirements.

Incentivized

• The main reason we got Handshake was to display visual gadgets for our accounting systems. We always provided spreadsheet type reports, but pictures and more engaging. Attorney gets a dashboard in real time of where they stand financially.
• Additional use as FAQ's in different departments in the firm, that is, accounting, IT, and office services.
• Knowledgebase - How to's and software.

Incentivized

• The full text searching feature, once implemented properly, is incredibly powerful.
• Integrates seamlessly with Outlook to reduce the number of pieces of software you need turning at any given time.
• Filing is relatively quick most of the time.

Incentivized

• Documentation is weak, but hopefully, since Aderant just acquired the company, that will improve

Incentivized

• Complicated setup. On initial installation it is cumbersome to configure on each workstation just to connect to service.
• Does not enforce structure. Once setting up structure, users can save outside of iManage Work and make their own files and folders under pre-configured system.
• Outlook is a finicky software, access to iManage Work depends on Outlook, nothing against iManage Work, but it sometimes has issues caused by the application it relies on.

Incentivized

We had an issue a few years ago where a plug-in of some sort which allowed the viewing of PDFs got updated and then whenever some people previewed PDFs in iManage then Outlook would crash. My outlook crashed over 20 times in a single day once. It was a pretty bad time. I know one of our information technology professionals in another office worked non-stop with iManage to get it resolved, and it seemed like they did take the issue pretty seriously.

Incentivized

None. Always need about Handshake's interface with Aderant, way before Aderant purchased them. Seemed like a natural fit.

Incentivized

I have viewed several other document management system software, but iManage was already installed at my company before I started working here. For us, I think this is the right solution. Companies with a smaller number of employees or smaller document collections could find some other options that might suite their needs and budget better. We definitely want an on premises solution that provides all the security, tracking, searching, and integration issues iManage offers. Many of the other solutions have adopted cloud technologies only at this point and we are not ready to consider cloud storage due for our sensitive documents at this point.

Incentivized

• Hard to say, but ultimately putting knowledge in the hands of fee earners immediately it is positive.

Incentivized

• A bit pricey but worth it once you know how to use it. It makes any document sharing easy and seamless which is priceless.

Incentivized