K2 BlackPearl and its use in an AmLaw 200 Law Firm
September 23, 2015
K2 BlackPearl and its use in an AmLaw 200 Law Firm
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Nintex Automation On-Prem / Nintex K2
Overall Satisfaction with Nintex Process Platform
We have used K2 BlackPearl as the core workflow engine for managing our new matter intake process. All new legal matters that come into the firm are entered into a complex form we built that is then routed using complex K2 workflows. We have a number of different workflows depending on the type of matter. For example, is it a new client and a new matter or a new matter for an existing client? All of the data for these new matters is stored in SharePoint and we use the SharePoint web parts to give people visibility into the status of the new matter workflow. It is being used across the entire firm and is a mission critical system.
- Extremely reliable. We have never had an outage or a major technical issue with it since we have deployed it.
- Very robust tool - can easily integrate with other systems using API's where necessary. (Called Smart Objects.)
- Handles versions of workflows very well. You can have older versions of workflows running while you work on and deploy newer versions. This happens seamlessly.
- Robust back office engine makes it very easy to see the status of workflows and to redirect or reroute or cancel as needed.
- We are not on the most [current] version so I can't do this fairly. I know that if you wanted to build forms without coding, you needed to use their SmartForms product which is a significant extra cost. They do have a basic forms package but it was not flexible enough for our needs.
- Reduced the time it took to open new matters from weeks to days or even hours.
- Significantly improved employee efficiency.
- Much improved reporting over our paper based system.
- Much better visibility into the new matter process.
More robust but more complex than Nintex, which installs directly on the SharePoint servers. At the time we were looking, Nintex was not a viable player. Another advantage of K2 is that there are books and a good user community. We initially tried SharePoint workflow but it was very clear that it was too primitive and inflexible a tool to do what we needed.