Does It Compute?

NetDocs Acquisition of Worldox - Costs and Options

If your firm uses Worldox, there are a number of hard decisions that need to be made now that Net Documents has acquired Worldox. Within the foreseeable future (maximum 3-4 years) NetDocs will probably sunset Worldox and it will simply stop working. That has been the lesson of the history of software acquisitions over the last 15 years or so.

NetDocs officially says that its “focus will be integrating Worldox customers onto our cutting-edge platform at their own pace.” As a practical matter, however, sales people have quotas to make and their income is at least in part based on commissions. So you can expect intense pressure from sales people to move to NetDocs sooner rather than later. Originally NetDocs said that while it would not sell new Worldox implementations, existing firms would be able to add users. However, it is not clear that that will still be the case, at least not after an initial period of time.

What is it going to cost? This will depend on a number of factors, but you should count on paying 5 or 6 times your current cost with Worldox on a yearly basis. This depends in part on whether the firm is using Symphony OCR with Worldox. NetDocs includes an OCR function, so you won’t need Symphony any more. That said, NetDocs is softening the pain somewhat by offering a 3-year buy-in with the first two years at sharply reduced prices (approximately 25% and 50% of the full price in years one and two respectively). It is not possible to put hard numbers to this, because NetDocs tends to negotiate prices individually with each firm. But the “standard” full price for a 20-user firm will probably be around $50-75/user/month. The per-user price would go down for larger firms, etc. In addition, NetDocs offers a delayed implementation feature. So if you sign up for NetDocs today, you can defer installation for a period of time (6 mos., a year) and defer paying as well. NetDocs wants to lock people in so they don’t start exploring other options.

What Are Your Options? The answer is, there are not many. Most practice management programs have some sort of primitive “document management” features but these are frequently not more than windows explorer on steroids, and firms have rejected them in favor of Worldox. The only other full-fledged DMS on the market at this point is iManage. This has traditionally focused on larger firms but they have recently brought out a cloud version. It may be worth checking out.

In any case, everything is up in the air right now, and I would hold off on making a quick decision. It is doubtful that anything bad will happen to Worldox within the next year or so, so the firm has some time to see how things sort out. The down side on waiting is that you may get a better deal if you convert to NetDocs sooner rather than later.

NetDocuments Acquires Worldox

NetDocuments announced this week that it has acquired Worldox, ending a protracted period of rumors and negotiations.

For the time being, nothing much will change. Officially, NetDocs position is that its “focus will be integrating Worldox customers onto our cutting-edge platform at their own pace.” What this means, I expect, is that within the next 3-5 years (or possibly less), Worldox will cease to exist as a viable option.

So current users will be fine for the immediate future, but it is time to think about what comes next. At this point, there are only two options: NetDocs or iManage. It is worth looking at both of them (iManage has announced it will be winding down its on-premise version in favor of the Cloud).

As a first step, firms might want to purchase an online training package. The one I prefer is from Peter Branningan’s DoxAdvisors (https://www.doxadvisors.com). It is a bit more expensive than some of the others, but worth it. This will give you a feel for how NetDocs works. My basic feeling after going through courses from a couple of vendors is that NetDocs is designed to be “windows-like” for middle level users and Worldox is designed for maximum productivity by high volume power users. NetDocs also generally has a more “do your own thing” approach (although this is configurable) whereas Worldox wants to centralize everything for a given matter (documents, scans, emails, etc.) into a single electronic searchable repository.

NetDocuments main attraction is the Cloud and functionality associated with it. In addition to the “work from anywhere” issue, NetDocuments can provide a portal for a firm’s clients to access specified documents and/or collaborate with attorneys on specific documents. It lets you send large files as a link (and you can control what sort of access the recipient has) as opposed to an actual file. NetDocs also has some nice features that Worldox lacked, such as the ability to create a PDF from a Word document when attaching it to an email or create a PDF as a version of a Word document.