Our Approach to Design
We design your DMS around how a corporate legal department actually works.
A corporate legal department organizes its work around matters, contracts, entities, and business units. Its documents have to connect to the ELM where matters live and the CLM where contracts live. Its access model has to respect privilege, ethical walls, and the reality that many of its collaborators sit outside legal, in procurement, finance, HR, and the business.
So we start with your structure rather than a template. We map how work actually arrives, who approves it, where it needs to land, and what has to be findable two years from now. Design for that, and the DMS becomes the place the department works rather than one more place to file.
That focus is the difference. Most DMS practices grew up serving law firms and carry firm-shaped assumptions with them. Ours is built for the in-house department, and our professionals bring firm and government experience in to serve it.
What we get right that others miss
Workspace design built from your matter, contract, and entity structures, not a law firm template
Migration scoped with cleanup, deduplication, and metadata design, so you arrive searchable
Email in scope from day one, because that is where the important correspondence lives
Privilege and ethical walls designed into the security model at the start
Workflow and intake designed alongside storage, so requests, approvals, and sign-offs run in the system
AI switched on after the content and permissions it depends on are trustworthy
Published Research
Document, contract, records, and knowledge management are four different systems.
This is the question we are asked more than any other, and getting it wrong is expensive: departments buy one system expecting it to do the job of another, then discover the gap after migration. Danish Butt wrote the reference on it for the Association of Corporate Counsel, setting out where each system starts, where they overlap, and how to decide which one owns which record. If the boundaries are still unclear at your organization, that is exactly the conversation we start with.
Microsoft Depth
Legal document management is a Microsoft problem too. We staff it that way.
Documents live in Outlook and Word. Collaboration happens in Teams and SharePoint. Retention and eDiscovery run through Purview. And Copilot is now asking for access to all of it. A legal DMS program that ignores the Microsoft estate around it solves half the problem.
Two of the people who lead this work spent most of their careers building that stack, with nearly 40 years at Microsoft between them. So when the question is whether to build on NetDocuments, SharePoint, or both, how Purview retention should be configured, or what Copilot should and should not be able to reach, the answer comes from people who worked on the platform rather than people who read the documentation.
Chief Information Officer
30+ years in technology leadership, including 23 years at Microsoft. Azure expert directing technology strategy and AI infrastructure.
PMO Director & DMS Lead
30+ years in IT, including 15+ years at Microsoft, then Director at Kroll. Leads program delivery and implementation governance.
Our Services
Document management services for corporate legal.
Strategy · Workspace Design · Migration · Email · Workflow · Knowledge · Governance · Governed AI
From selection through migration, adoption, and ongoing administration.
01
DMS Strategy & Selection
Whether you need a dedicated legal DMS at all, how it fits your ELM and CLM, and which platform fits your department. We are partner-certified and selection-honest.
02
Workspace & Matter Design
Workspace architecture built around your matters, contracts, entities, and business units, with metadata and filing structures lawyers will actually follow.
03
Workflow, Intake & Approvals
Work intake that routes each request to the right owner, approval and sign-off chains that match your delegation of authority, and status visibility so legal stops chasing. Automated with PatternBuilder MAX where automation earns its place.
04
Knowledge Management
Turning finished work product into reusable precedent: template and clause libraries, playbooks, and search that surfaces what the department already knows instead of rewriting it.
05
Implementation & Configuration
NetDocuments deployment configured for corporate legal: security model, ethical walls, records policies, and Microsoft 365 integration.
06
Migration
Off shared drives, legacy and on-prem DMS platforms (OpenText eDocs, iManage, and others), and email archives, using proven third-party migration tooling where it accelerates delivery. Cleanup, deduplication, and metadata enrichment included, since migrating a mess produces a searchable mess.
07
Email Management
Filing predictable enough that correspondence lands in the matter file without heroics.
08
Adoption Rescue & Data Remediation
For departments that already own a DMS nobody trusts. We remediate the data, rebuild folder structures around how corporate legal actually works, and restore user confidence in the system. Rescue engagements are a meaningful share of our DMS practice.
09
Information Governance & Records
Retention, data residency, regulatory alignment, and records management design, including deployments built on Microsoft 365, SharePoint, and Purview where that is the right stack.
10
Governed Legal AI
ndMAX Assist and PatternBuilder MAX enabled on a foundation of clean content and correct permissions, in that order.
11
Adoption & Change Management
The Swiftwater change program, applied to the tool lawyers touch more than any other.
12
Admin & Managed Services
Ongoing administration, enhancements, federated search into enterprise and third-party systems, and user support after go-live.
Document Management Practice
Named practitioners. Migrations measured in terabytes.
Behind the named practitioners sits a bench of experienced document management SMEs and delivery experts, with certified depth across NetDocuments, ndMAX, and PatternBuilder, and hands-on experience with the migration tooling that makes multi-terabyte moves predictable.
PMO Director & DMS Lead
Bob is a leader in Swiftwater's document management practice. His career in the discipline runs through Kroll's document management group within information governance, and some of the most complicated cross-platform data migrations in the industry. He delivered one of the largest NetDocuments implementations on record, for an organization with local offices in all 50 US states, and has implemented DMS programs for corporate law departments, government agencies, and AmLaw firms, including a multi-terabyte on-prem to on-prem migration driven by data residency and ownership requirements, and a country-sovereignty carve-out of a separate instance and domain spanning Exchange, DMS, and billing systems, delivered to a cutover deadline with no disruption to business as usual.
NetDocuments • iManage • SharePoint • Data Migration • Information Governance
CEO & Co-Founder · Information Governance Leader
Hassan leads Swiftwater's information governance practice, with 30+ years guiding global clients on technology and transformation, including at Kroll. He delivered a DMS to a large global oil and gas company integrated with the matter and eBilling systems, producing a full document and matter lifecycle management system rather than a standalone repository.
Information Governance • DMS + ELM Integration • Records Management
Managing Director
Danish pioneered matter-centric document management for corporate law departments and has specialized in DMS selection and implementation across insurance, pharmaceutical, high tech, manufacturing, utilities, and oil and gas, including highly regulated environments. Selected engagements: NetDocuments across a PE-backed utility aggregation and grid company governed by FERC, NERC, and multiple agencies; a top pharmaceutical company's DMS launched across 5 global jurisdictions with local repositories and infrastructure designed for global document traffic; a global insurance DMS across 400+ users, rescued from failed adoption through data remediation, corporate-legal folder redesign, and federated search into internal and third-party systems including Thomson Reuters; a legacy OpenText eDocs/Hummingbird migration covering 5 TB of shared drives and 1 TB of DMS data; and records management across 3,000 professionals at a professional services organization on Microsoft 365, SharePoint, and Purview.
NetDocuments • iManage • SharePoint • Box • Matter-Centric Design • Knowledge Management
Also relevant to this practice
Where documents meet the rest of the stack
A DMS is one system among several. The value comes from deciding which one owns which record, and connecting them so the department stops re-filing the same document three times.
Common questions