How Orpen Franks solicitors use Ideals to provide legal and business advice

Overview

Orpen Franks Solicitors LLP is an award-winning Irish law firm with its roots in 19th-century Dublin. The firm provides specialized legal advice to individuals and businesses throughout Ireland and abroad.

In 2020, they conducted their first project with Ideals; a big share offering for one of their major clients. Since then, they’ve opened dozens more rooms to manage different projects for clients and also for internal sharing of documents.

Paula McGlone, their legal secretary, is impressed by how the platform is “so easy to use, easy to maintain, and provides an efficient way to manage documents as needed,” the team can always verify “who’s been using it, who’s logged in, who hadn’t logged in yet, and everything we need to know!”

The context

Orpen Franks was created in the 1960s by the merger of two existing companies – Orpen & Co. Solicitors, established in the mid-1800s, and Franks & Oulton, Solicitors, founded in 1912. They later absorbed several other law companies to become one of Dublin’s leading firms.

In 2020 one of their biggest clients embarked on a huge corporate transaction involving the sale of shares and properties that they owned. For that, Orpen Franks needed to find the most secure and efficient method of exchanging highly confidential information with potential shareholders and would-be buyers in Dublin and overseas.

Key challenges

The firm had mixed experience with using online document exchanges: “Some of them were okay to use, but others were not user-friendly,” and with one of their biggest clients wanting to sell both shares and property, the team also concluded that “for something this big we needed more security.” 

One of their partners, Claire Morgan, came across Ideals and signed up for a trial, asking Paula to verify the quality of the platform. Paula was impressed that Ideals was so easy to use, but it was the security levels that sold it: “Claire was worried about what level of permissions each person or each party was going to get because not everybody was allowed to download all the documents or edit the data, so it was very important that some people could just go in and view it.”

For this project, their client wanted to sell shares in their company and at the same time, market a number of properties they owned, so the firm needed to:

• Store potentially thousands of confidential documents securely
• Share documents quickly with multiple third parties in Ireland and overseas
• Set different security levels to control who could download or edit documents
• Keep the real estate transactions separate from the share transactions 

Paula was also impressed by the Ideals support and the speed of the rollout: “Once we were ready, it did not take long at all to invite people and get them set up. Within a day, we had everybody invited.”

Solution

After their initial 6-month contract had been completed, Orpen Franks knew they wanted to keep using Ideals to share confidential documents. 

Two years later, with nine current projects ongoing, the three things they like most about Ideals are:

• Branding. To be able to use their own logo and colors to convey a truly professional image
• Notifications. They can do an update for all users every thirty minutes when a project is nearing completion. Paula concludes, “this is a great feature as well and keeps everyone happy.”
• Support. With “questions answered within a couple of minutes” said Paula, “I think this is great.” 

Their new contract also gives them the document redaction option, which Paula confirms to be “a great feature for us.”

The future 

Orpen Franks currently uses Ideals daily across their commercial and property departments, to share confidential drafts and documents with clients and third parties while maintaining absolute control of everything that goes on with their assorted projects.