Introduction

Goldberg Segalla is one of the largest and fastest-growing law firms in the United States, headquartered in Buffalo, NY and with an international footprint that reaches from Los Angeles to London. Its 400+ lawyers serve regional, national, and international clients from over 20 offices, with teams based in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Miami, St. Louis, and other major business and economic centers across 10 states.

The firm prides itself on its collaborative approach across practice areas to provide clients and colleagues with best practice counsel and high cost-efficiency; an approach that is facilitated by BigHand’s centralized, template automation and management platform, BigHand Document Creation.

Managing Growth

Since 2001, Goldberg Segalla has grown from a handful of pioneering lawyers into an international team of over 1,000. Remarkably, the firm has achieved this without ever compromising on its founding principles—never undertaking a merger or large acquisition and growing essentially one lawyer at a time.

With rapid growth underway, the firm was challenged with the overhead this placed on its document templates. As Laura DeBlasi, Training Manager at Goldberg Segalla, explains: “At the time, we were manually creating a letterhead for each of our new offices, while also having to update the footer on existing letterheads which listed all of our locations.

“From an operational perspective, this was not only hugely time-consuming, but we also wanted to reduce the risk of errors creeping in due to the incorrect cloning of documents. BigHand Document Creation was the perfect solution as it provided a single, centralized source that we could roll out across the entire firm, irrespective of location or function.”

Goldberg Segalla went live with the firm-wide implementation of BigHand Document Creation as part of an ambitious system overhaul that included a Microsoft Windows and Office upgrade, as well as its iManage practice management system.

Shared Best Practice

Since its original implementation, the firm’s use of BigHand Document Creation has significantly expanded. Indeed, the platform is now well established as the go-to hub for all of Goldberg Segalla’s templates, from accounting, through to PowerPoint presentations, Word documents and pleadings.

Moreover, the organization is currently in the process of upgrading to the latest version of Document Creation, based on Windows 10 and Office 2016, which includes new functionality such as the Content Builder module, combining both Advanced AutoText and Cross-Reference Finder features.

“Advanced AutoText is something we’re particularly excited by,” says Ms DeBlasi. “It will enable us to maximize the use of our clause library across many of our practice groups and facilitate best practice by highlighting clauses that worked perfectly for a particular case and bringing that clause to the user, rather than them having to filter through historic documents.”

It will also further increase our operational efficiency with regard to engagement letters and document assembly. For example, users will be able to pre-select the jurisdiction, type of case and rate structure, and the document will assemble itself with minimal edits required, while also ensuring content is fully compliant.

In addition, new security parameters will allow Goldberg Segalla to ringfence specific templates – such as accounting – so that only authorized users can access them.

Looking ahead, the firm is also considering iManage integration, which will enable users to retrieve client data from the iManage database and insert it into the correct BigHand Document Creation template fields automatically.

Trusted Partner

“We couldn’t be happier with BigHand as a technology provider,” says Ms DeBlasi. “I’d say they provide the best customer service of all our vendors. They get back to us almost immediately and have really helped ensure that the platform is pushing us forward with our business objectives. It gives a huge amount of reassurance that any future initiatives will be safe hands.”

For example, Goldberg Segalla recently undertook a wholescale rebranding exercise, from color schemes to logos. “Thanks to Document Creation, we were able to roll out all the new templates in just two days,” Ms DeBlasi concludes.

Compared to our historic way of working, the benefits are simply unquantifiable and the platform’s user friendliness truly  facilitates our corporate ethos of cost-efficiency, collaboration and best practice.