Transform Data International and Panoram Digital partner to bring M365 Technology Solutions to UK Legal Market

UK News

29
Apr
2021

Editor

Transform Data International and Panoram Digital today announced their plans to partner together to bring M365-based solutions to the UK Legal technology market. 

Panoram is a specialist M365 digital solutions provider to the UK legal sector, launched during lockdown last year in response to the accelerating trend for legal teams to digitise their practices on enterprise technology platforms they already use, saving time and money and creating unified digital experiences for their lawyers and clients. 

Panoram’s founders are respected experts in legal technology and legal practice. Rick Seabrook is a digital transformation leader and former Consulting Partner at Accenture. Along with Panoram co-founders, Greg Wildisen, a seasoned Legal Technology entrepreneur and Martin Bonney, a renowned international eDiscovery and data governance leader, they previously led the European and Far East operations of Epiq Systems. They were joined as co-founders by Isabel Parker, formerly Chief Legal Innovation Officer at UK Law firm Freshfields and now executive director at not-for-profit Digital Legal Exchange (D-Lex). 

Transform Data is an established European legal tech business serving many law firms and legal departments in 13 countries. Like Panoram, they are a reseller and implementation partner for Repstor’s Custodian for Legal product which provides matter lifecycle management on M365.

Transform Data have developed an exciting suite of new products, which this partnership will see introduced to the UK legal market through Panoram:

• Qwickr – a highly effective search tool that allows lawyers to easily search and retrieve documents and emails within Microsoft 365 Mailboxes, SharePoint and OneDrive for Business.
• Qonnector – a Practice Management System (PMS) connector that ensures automatic (one-way) synchronisation of the most relevant information from any PMS to SharePoint/Microsoft 365. 
• Qontext - a browser-based web application which allows users to aggregate, present and update information from various systems and sources in a user-friendly interface.
• Migration Toolkit – Helping firms move large volumes of legacy documents and meta-data to the cloud and replace legacy document management systems (like iManage) with Custodian for Legal.

The Partnership

Under the terms of the partnership, Transform Data will support Panoram and their mutual software partner Repstor to deliver M365-based solutions to the UK Legal market. Additionally, Panoram will resell and distribute Transform Data’s products to new and existing Repstor clients. The initial focus of the partnership will center around launching two solutions:

• Migrations to Microsoft 365 based Document Management Solutions - Both Panoram and Transform Data team note that more and more legal organisations are switching to a Microsoft 365 based Document Management platform, as the many advantages of a fully cloud architecture and the rich functionality of the core Microsoft 365 platform at a fraction of the price of commercial legal tech software become apparent. However, historically the switch costs and risks have been prohibitively high to consider viable. Through their years of experience in document, e-mail and matter management in the law firm, corporate legal and professional services sectors, Transform Data have developed a suite of standard products and methodologies to solve the common challenges when replacing a legacy DMS with Microsoft 365, such as PMS Integrations, Advanced Search solutions and document migrations. When combined with law firm’s increased adoption of M365, for online working, many of these barriers are coming down. 
• Microsoft Teams Lifecycle Management for Legal Matters - 12 months into the Pandemic, many law firms are exploring the next step in matter-based collaboration on Microsoft Teams. Both Panoram and Transform Data share this vision and have experience in rolling out M365 Teams for legal, in particular Repstor Custodian for Teams product which provides end to end MS Teams lifecycle management automation. 

Rob Kubben, partner and co-founder at Transform Data International: “We’ve known the Panoram team for years and it has always been a pleasure working together with such professionals. Panoram and Transform Data share the belief that harnessing existing enterprise technology investments is the most cost-effective and successful way to adopting further legal digitisation. We’re looking forward to continuing this journey via our new partnership and grow the Repstor and Transform Data community in the UK via this collaboration.”

“The imperative is to enable new digital ways of working immediately, minimising disruption to everyday activity”, Rick says. “The Custodian for Legal platform is designed to run natively within Microsoft 365 and harnesses the investment legal teams have already made in the Microsoft 365 platform whilst transforming matter use cases such as document & e-mail management, collaboration, and matter lifecycle management. As an experienced supplier of the Repstor’s Custodian for Legal platform in Mainland Europe it was this ethos that made Transform Data the obvious partner for us to accelerate bringing M365 based matter lifecycle management to UK.”