Microsoft Office SystemCustomer Solution Case Study

Law Firm Digitizes Bond Series’ Transaction Process Eliminating $1.1M

OverviewCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Professional services—Legal

Customer ProfileOrrick is an international law firm with more than 1,000 lawyers located in 18 offices throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. The firm focuses on litigation, finance, and innovative corporate transactions. The Global Operations Center (GOC) houses Orrick's core technology, finance, human resources, and document services operations.

Business SituationOrrick wanted to streamline a highly manual, paper-based process for completing weekly bond series transactions.

SolutionUsing Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007, Workshare, and IntelliSafe, Orrick created an extranet for document management and collaboration.

Benefits Greater efficiency Highly extensible, reusable

solution

“Not only can we save a million dollars a year with SharePoint Server 2007, Workshare, and IntelliSafe, we’ve also gained the ability to add new clients and greatly expand the Structured Finance business.”Wendy Attenberger, Web Engineering Manager, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe

Since 1863, Orrick has provided clients with legal services in transactional law and litigation. Within its Structured Finance practice, Orrick helps clients execute transfers of securities interests using a widely-used manual process to complete weekly transactions. To support a higher volume of business, the firm is using Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007, a document control and audit solution from Microsoft partner Workshare, and a digital signing platform from Microsoft partner IntelliSafe, to create an extranet for processing transactional documents. With this new system, Orrick will be able to add new clients with current resources while saving roughly U.S.$1.1 million annually by eliminating many of the costs associated with a paper-based system.

SituationWith more than one thousand lawyers working from 18 offices worldwide, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe provides legal services in the areas of litigation, complex and novel finance, and innovative corporate transactions. Clients include Fortune 100 companies, major industrial and financial corporations, commercial and investment banks, high-growth companies, governmental organizations, startups, and individuals.

Orrick’s Structured Finance department is responsible for helping top-tier financial clients complete weekly transfers of interests in securities, known as bond series transactions. One of the firm’s primary clients, a Fortune 50 financial management corporation, relies on Orrick to complete, on average, 50 bond series transactions a week. This client’s transactions are deposited to the Depository Trust Company (DTC). DTC, a limited purpose trust company and a registered clearing agency, is a member of the U.S. Federal Reserve System. Each week, in anticipation of DTC’s scheduled Thursday afternoon execution of bond series transactions, in which Orrick’s client’s asset transfers are completed—or “closed”—Orrick’s Structured Finance department prepares the required documents and contracts. This preparation involves verifying accounting, reviewing changes made to documents, and acquiring the necessary signatures from involved parties such as trustees, trustors,

trustee councils, liquidity banks, and liquidity bank councils. Documents can be as long as 50 pages, and 15 or more documents may be involved in a single transaction. At approximately 50 transactions each week, the paperwork involved is monumental.

To finalize each contract, paper documents are delivered to these many signatories using bicycle couriers in New York City or, for those outside the city, U.S. or international mail.

Mark Infantino, Web Engineering Specialist at Orrick, says, “With couriers traveling throughout the city, ‘sticky notes’ marking numerous signature pages, and huge rooms dedicated to filing closing documentation, the process is extremely inefficient and turnaround time is long.”

Changes made to contracts and other documents must be tracked carefully, and the firm’s existing process presented several challenges. Orrick used Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 Web-based extranet and third-party software to share documents and collaborate on revisions, but the private extranet wasn’t open to all of the signatories involved. In addition, the signatories made multiple revisions to the documents, and, says Infantino, “The legal blackline capabilities of the current solutionwas limited, at best.” In order to produce a careful audit trail, Orrick needed to track, review, distribute,

“With couriers traveling throughout the city, ‘sticky notes’ marking numerous signature pages, and huge rooms dedicated to filing closing documentation, the process is extremely inefficient and turnaround time is long.”Mark Infantino, Web Engineering

and archive legal blackline copies of the documents, detailing the history of changes made to each document—a time-consuming, labor-intensive process.

In addition, post-closing procedures are equally cumbersome. One of them, transcripting, involves scanning and converting paper documents using a third-party tool to Portable Document Format (PDF) files, archiving the files in an electronic repository, burning the files to CDs, and distributing these CDs to the client and the signatories in each transaction. These post-closing procedures can take two to three weeks to complete.

In January 2007, the Structured Finance department did a cost analysis of its process for closing bond series transactions and found that for 50 closings, it was spending roughly U.S.$24,650 each week on courier fees, shipping, transcript and archival

services, CD distribution, and associated labor. This amounted to a yearly expenditure of approximately $1.1 million.

The time-intensive process also limited how much business Structured Finance could manage. Wendy Attenberger, Web Engineering Manager at Orrick, says that the firm’s transaction volume grew significantly in the past year, from 17 closings a week to 50. “This really put a strain on the firm’s resources,” says

Attenberger. “The Structured Finance department recognized the limitations of the system and knew that soon it wouldn’t be able to handle more growth.”

While Orrick currently provides this extranet service for a limited number of clients, many of its 10,000 active clients partake in similar bond series transactions. “There’s a large client base out there to whom we could be providing these services,” says Attenberger. “But we simply couldn’t handle a higher volume with our previous solution.” Orrick needed a secure, electronic solution for sharing, revising, auditing, signing, and archiving documents—one that could be easily accessed by all parties involved.

SolutionStructured Finance worked with IT to streamline the bond series transaction process. “The more the department became aware of electronic collaboration technologies, the more interested it became in digitizing this process,” says Attenberger. “We wanted to be able to share these documents from a central location—so that everyone involved in a bond series transaction could access the required documents on the extranet, partake in a legal blackline process based on a defined workflow, and sign the documents electronically.”

The goal was to implement a solution that would deliver a collaborative

extranet with robust document-comparison capabilities, document management, digital signing capabilities, and enhanced security. Orrick was already using desktop software from Workshare that provided document security, metadata-removal capabilities, management of the review process, and the ability to audit the history of changes made to documents. Workshare, an information security company and Microsoft Gold Certified partner, and the 2007 Microsoft Partner of the Year for ISV/Software Solutions, delivers solutions for secure content compliance that provide complete document lifecycle management capabilities.

To extend this solution, Orrick evaluated Workshare Document Control and Audit Services, an enterprise server-based solution based on the Microsoft .NET platform. Orrick liked the extensive, on-demand document-processing services that spanned the document lifecycle, including filtering, analysis, security, audit and compliance, and comparison. And the product’s ability to integrate with Web-based enterprise content management solutions offered Orrick the high performance and uninterrupted, error-free operation it needed.

The ability to access the Workshare services as a Web service fit well with Orrick’s decision to upgrade to a next-generation extranet solution based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

“SharePoint Server 2007 has evolved into a first-class, enterprise content management system,” says Stewart Elliot, Director of Alliances at Workshare. “The workflow, document management, and collaborative features it provides are a great complement to our document comparison, compliance, and security solutions—it’s become a key component of our solution offering. The integrated system provides a comprehensive, secure collaboration platform that automates document-centric workflows.” Because Office SharePoint Server 2007 is built on an open architecture that supports Web services, it is highly interoperable and easy to integrate with products and solutions like those from Workshare.

Security was a primary consideration in implementing a digital solution. “We were excited about the security enhancements in SharePoint Server 2007,” says Infantino. “The security is a lot more granular than what we’ve had in the past, and the structure is already built, already proven, because it’s based on the Microsoft .NET security model. Essentially, the security we needed was all there in Office SharePoint Server 2007—we didn’t have to reinvent the wheel.”

“SharePoint Server 2007 has evolved into a first-class, enterprise content management system…. It's become a key component of our solution offering.”Stewart Elliot, Director of Alliances,

Using Office SharePoint Server 2007, Orrick can better ensure that sensitive client information is controlled and managed carefully with features such as item-level security, customizable workflow, and storage policies. Also, integrated records management that allows Orrick to store client records for the appropriate amount of time helps the firm to ensure that it is in compliance with governmental regulations and corporate policies.

Attenberger’s team used Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 and the Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 Team Edition for Software Developers development system to streamline the bond series transaction process. The team designed custom workflows

for moving documents through the approval process and created document libraries for storing and managing contracts and other documents. It also built the forms that are displayed when users want to edit or display an item in a library or add a new item.

The team integrated the Workshare component into the Office SharePoint Server 2007–based extranet using the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0. Now, at any point in the document-approval process, a reviewer accessing a document on Orrick’s extranet can make revisions and use the legal blacklining features of Workshare’s service to see and audit exactly how the document has been changed, and by whom, since the original version was created. “With this solution, we can consume Workshare’s services as a Web service within a highly secure client extranet,” says Attenberger. The workflow for approving bond series transaction documents is now highly automated and online. Orrick employees are notified when the transaction is assembled, informed of the tasks they must complete, and—once the documents are finalized—advised when a signing package is produced. The team also integrated a digital signature solution from IntelliSafe Technologies that allows signatories to electronically sign the required documents on the extranet. The signing package is made available on the extranet to all involved parties—Orrick lawyers, the

SharePoint site where new bond series are created.

client, and the signatories—and with a single click, each signatory can sign multiple documents and contracts contained in the package. Once the transaction is closed, the documents are converted to PDFs and archived in a document library, and final copies distributed.

BenefitsUsing Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the solution from Workshare, Orrick has streamlined a highly manual, costly, and time-intensive process. The newfound efficiencies resulting from this solution enable Orrick to realize significant cost-savings and greatly expand its bond series transaction business.

Greater EfficiencyWith Office SharePoint Server 2007, Orrick has created a paperless, collaborative environment for distributing documents, acquiring signatures, and archiving final copies of bond series transactions. As an on-demand Web services application, the solution offers immediate access to users, whether working within the network or remotely. It offers rich functionality without requiring third-party software or utilities. The user interface is simple and intuitive, speeding the learning process for first-time users, and requiring little or no training. And, with integrated digital signature capabilities, Orrick clients and signatories can access documents immediately—without waiting for delivery of paper copies—and sign multiple documents with a

single click, rather than sorting through many different documents, pulling out the signature pages, signing them, and replacing them in the proper spots.

Additionally, Infantino says that “once the transaction is closed, if someone wants to see a particular document, that person can log in from anywhere and view the document immediately. That person no longer has to request that a copy be sent to him. Office SharePoint Server 2007 with Workshare’s Web services enabled us to take a highly repetitive process that took weeks to complete and reduce it to mere minutes.”

Highly Extensible, Reusable SolutionThe new Office SharePoint Server 2007–extranet for processing bond series transactions is extensible and reusable in a number of ways. IT has been able to take advantage of many of the pieces used to build the solution—such as the transcripting process and the electronic signatures capability—and repurpose them for other areas of the business.

Most importantly, is the new system’s ability to expand. “The solution is extensible in that it can be applied to any Orrick client who does similar transactional work,” says Chuck Newark, Senior Software Architect, ColdCypress, an IT consulting firm and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. Newark helped Attenberger’s team with the development of the entire solution.

Comment workflow acceptance screen on Orrick extranet.

Rather than building a different solution for each Orrick client, the firm can easily customize and reuse its existing implementation of Office SharePoint Server 2007 to fit the needs of each client—and each department in Orrick. “Our Public Finance department is already considering taking advantage of this solution,” says Infantino. Public Finance follows a similar process involving clients buying and selling bonds in which documents and contracts are written, shared, reviewed, finalized, and signed.

Simplified, Enhanced Audit ProcessWith the integration of Workshare Document Control and Audit Service, Orrick can quickly and easily share documents and produce detailed audit trails of each document in the bond series transaction process without creating a lengthy paper trail. “We were very limited in how we shared documents with those outside the firm,” says Infantino. “We used to have to forward documents to those who didn’t have access to the extranet, and print many copies of each change made in order to produce an accurate history of changes. The SharePoint Server 2007–based extranet allows for collaboration as well as much more robust auditing of document changes and comments.”

Cost Savings of $1.1 Million per YearOrrick estimates that its new system for processing bond series transactions will save the firm more than U.S.$1.1 million annually by

eliminating all of the costs of processing paper contracts and documents for approximately 2,400 closings each year. “Not only do we stand to save a million dollars a year with SharePoint Server 2007 and Workshare, we’ve also gained the ability to add new clients and expand the Structured Finance business,” says Attenberger.

Future PlansOrrick plans to upgrade from Microsoft Office Professional 2003 to the 2007 Microsoft Office release. “The 2007 release will simplify a lot of the firm’s document conversion needs,” says Newark. “For example, Orrick will be able to export documents directly as PDFs in Microsoft Office Word 2007, without using third-party conversion tools.”

“The SharePoint Server 2007–based extranet allows for collaboration as well as much more robust auditing of document changes and comments.”Mark Infantino, Web Engineering Specialist, Orrick, Herrington &

Microsoft Office SystemThe Microsoft Office system is the business world’s chosen environment for information work, providing the programs, servers, and services that help you succeed by transforming information into impact.

For more information about the Microsoft Office system, go to: www.microsoft.com/office

For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com

For more information about Workshare products and services, call (888) 404-4246 or visit the Web site at: www.workshare.com

For more information about IntelliSafe Technologies products and services, call (888) 239-8515 x303 or visit the Web site at: www.intellisafe.com

For more information about Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe products and services, call (415) 773-5700 or visit the Web site at: www.orrick.com

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published February 2008

Software and Services Microsoft Office

− Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Microsoft Visual Studio− Microsoft Visual Studio 2005

Team Edition for Software Developers

Dell Optiplex desktop computers Dell Latitude D620 portable

computers HP ProLiant DL380 quad core server

computer

Partners Workshare IntelliSafe