Stacks Law Firm's intranet experience with LumApps

About Stacks Law Firm

Stacks Law Firm is a network of independent Law Firms located on the Eastern Australian coast with over 250 employees and 21 offices. The head office is located in Sydney and handles strategy, marketing, IT and transformation.

Employees:

< 3000

Services:

Internal Communications

Human Resources

Information Technology

Industries:

Legal Services

Locations :

Their Communication Objectives

A core value of the firm is connecting lawyers across the network. Knowledge sharing is integral to lawyers, whether that be sharing information about an updates to legislation, documents or legal strategy. As a consequence of this, the firm has always valued having a powerful and flexible communication platform to connect its lawyers so that they can access the firm’s resources whether they are at home, the office or in the courthouse. Stacks launched a simple “.net” custom platform over a decade ago designed for top-down communication and later moved to Jive where they adopted a bottom-up collaborative approach to knowledge sharing. In recent years it became apparent that Stacks needed to upgrade to a platform that was more robust, able to handle both bottom-up and top-down communications and integrated with modern web 2.0 technologies.

Everyday users don’t usually create news, but they talk to each other, they share info, tips & tricks. We needed a system that makes those conversations easy to have, and the content shared in those conversations easy to find.

Ben Stack

CEO at Stacks Law Firm

Microsoft Tools vs. Intranet Platform

Microsoft 365 is at the heart of the Stacks’ technology stack. Initially, Stacks considered developing their own solution using a combination Microsoft tools. However, the development costs to custom fit a solution using Outlook, SharePoint or Yammer would be too high in return for low outcomes.

In 2015, Stacks implemented a new intranet built on the Jive platform. In the first few years Jive was a fantastic solution, however, over time, the platform did not continue to deliver the level of features required to keep on improving the communication and collaboration.

Users were confused by the excessive number of buttons, menus and options on Jive. It was messy and hard to learn. Stacks therefore began to search for a platform that was simple, clean and easy to learn.

Stacks Law Firm, Place&Co and LumApps

The seamless integration with Microsoft tools and Azure AD was imperative when looking for a new platform. It was also important that the vendor be able to migrate five years’ worth of Jive data to the new platform. Finally, the ability for any user to easily create content played an important part in the vendor selection process: LumApps was ahead of all other vendors evaluated. LumApps and Place&Co managed the whole migration process the vast majority of existing content in Jive was migrated using LumApps’ migration tools and expertise. The migration team were able to run reports on the current state of Stacks’ Jive instance in order to identify the contents that needed to be migrated to ensure accuracy.

The team at Stacks Law Firm created the templates for migration and a trial migration was conducted, which was essential to understand the interactions between content before running the live migration. Overall, the team at Stacks Law were happy with the whole implementation process. The whole project took three months end to end, which considering the large data migration, was an excellent outcome. LumApps provided a trial platform throughout the project that gave the Stacks team a sandbox to experiment, test concepts and designs.

Learning from LumApps Customers

Place&Co facilitated multiple one-on-one discussions between Stacks and existing LumApps local customers, who were happy to share their experience and the way they had configured their LumApps platform. This was extremely useful: not only did it prove the reliability and capabilities of the system, but it also provided an understanding of real life use-cases and how other organisations address them in LumApps, helping Stacks to make early decisions about their configuration.

Key use cases

Culture of Communities

Having “Communities” built around legal, business and social topics was important to Stacks. Users are able to quickly create posts, share knowledge and communicate with the broader Stacks network.

Knowledge Hubs

Having an online hub for all the firm’s legal resources from precedent documents to research tools enables lawyers to do their work whether their at home, the office or the courthouse.

Clean and Simple User Interface

The ability to completely customise the look and feel of LumApps meant that Stacks were able to adopt a clean and simple layout that was easy for their users to navigate.

Single Sign-On with Microsoft

Being able to use Microsoft as an identity provider with Single Sign On enabled users to log in once to access multiple applications.

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Key Learnings

The most common feedback from user is surprise at how easy it is, which was one of the best outcomes management could have expected.

An early measurable achievement in this project was the ability for LumApps and Place&Co to seamlessly and quickly migrate the business from Jive to LumApps.