FROM BINDERS TO THE CLOUD: HOW ONE MID-SIZE LAW FIRM TRANSFORMED ENTITY MANAGEMENT

THE BINDER ERA

Not long ago, managing a company's corporate records meant maintaining a physical binder—a three-ring repository of resolutions, minutes, certificates, and filings that lived in a vault and had to be found, pulled, photocopied, and mailed when anyone needed anything.

For law firms managing dozens—or hundreds—of entities on behalf of clients, that process was the industry standard. And for many firms, it still is. .

"It's still a very paper-heavy industry," says Patrick Leahy, Corporate Paralegal at Preti Flaherty, a mid-size regional law firm. "But that's changing."

Preti Flaherty serves clients across corporate, M&A, real estate, and litigation practice areas, managing hundreds of companies on their behalf—tracking annual compliance, officer elections, ownership structures, and more. For years, they kept up with physical binders. Then came a wave of digitization efforts that helped the margins, but didn't solve the underlying problem: too much information, in too many places, managed by too many informal systems.

THE WORKAROUND ERA

The firm's journey from paper to digital wasn’t a single leap, but a series of steps; each one an improvement on the last, but none quite closing the gap.

They'd tried multiple platforms over the years. When a critical integration wasn't available on one, they moved on. When a document production feature underdelivered on another, they moved on again. In between migrations, the team improvised: a special folder structure, informal handoffs, individual knowledge filling in where the system fell short.

"With our previous system, the virtual record book feature kind of fell flat, to be honest," Patrick recalls. "So we just had a special folder in iManage to store documents and tried to be organized. That was kind of the virtual record book for a while."

It worked—until it didn't. As client volume grew and team complexity increased, informal scaffolding started showing its limits. Work moved slowly when the right person wasn't available. No one could easily see where a transaction stood. Records were organized, but not truly accessible.

The firm needed something built for the actual scale of what they were doing.

DECIDING TO MOVE—AGAIN

For Patrick, the decision to upgrade to Unity® Entity Management wasn't hard to justify on its merits. The platform was clearly better: cloud-based (a meaningful IT win), deeply integrated with iManage, and built around a task management system that matched how a corporate team actually works.

The harder sell was internal. The firm had just completed a database migration three years earlier—a tasking process that no one was in a hurry to repeat. Change fatigue is real in legal operations, and asking a team to re-orient around another new system requires trust that the investment will pay off.

"At the end of the day, it wasn’t really an option," Patrick says, about the team deciding to move again. "It was clearly a better product. It was going to happen eventually, so better to rip the band-aid off sooner than later."

The firm went live in November 2025 as part of the first wave of firms to adopt Unity® Entity Management. As Patrick notes, large-scale database transitions sometimes come with complexity, but their experience followed a well-anticipated roadmap.

"I don’t believe a perfect database conversion is possible under any circumstance," he says. "It was kind of what I expected. No regrets."

Those early experiences helped shape and refine the onboarding process, and because of that groundwork, firms are now up and running in Unity® Entity Management within days.

WHERE THE DIFFERENCE SHOWS UP

A few months in, the value is showing up in tangible and specific, repeatable ways.

Task Management as Team Infrastructure

The feature Patrick mentions most often is simple but crucial: task management—the ability to assign, track, and hand off work in a structured way that doesn't depend on any one person.

In a practice area where a transaction can span months and involve multiple team members, that kind of institutional visibility is how work gets done reliably.

A “Wow” Moment

When asked whether he'd had a single "wow" moment with the platform, one situation stood out to Patrick.

A client called, urgently needing a complete set of corporate records. In the old world, that meant time, scrambling, and probably a delay. Instead, Patrick pulled everything together in a few minutes and sent a clean, organized package immediately.

"It took me a couple of minutes, and I could send them exactly what they needed, easily and quickly," he says. "That was pretty cool."

Hours-Saving Document Generation

The firm is in the early stages of creating document templates in Unity® Entity Management, customizing their internal suite of standard documents so they can be generated automatically rather than drafted from scratch each time.

"We can now generate a full set of standard documents at the click of a button—it's going to save us hours," Patrick says.

WHAT COMES NEXT: AI AT THE INTAKE STAGE

The feature Patrick is most excited about is AI capability.

When a new client comes on board and brings a stack of corporate records—physical binders, scanned documents, accumulated filings—the intake process is slow and manual. Every piece of information has to be interpreted and entered. For a firm managing hundreds of entities, that adds up.

The prospect of uploading a PDF and having the system do that work automatically is, in his words, something that "feels like witchcraft."

"It'll increase our productivity exponentially," he says. Even if it does 60% of the work and a human does 40%, that’s a dramatic improvement. "It will still be totally worth it."

AN INDUSTRY AT A TURNING POINT

The broader picture Patrick describes is one of an industry in transition but moving slowly.

He estimates that many smaller firms are still running on paper. Even among mid-size firms, a hybrid model—paper records plus a digital system running in parallel—is common. The reasons are familiar: cost sensitivity among smaller practices, IT departments hard-pressed to justify another software spend, and an older generation of legal professionals who built their practices around physical records and see little reason to change.

"It's been the industry standard to have paper binders up until recently," Patrick says. "Only the most innovative-thinking firms have really embraced a paperless system."

But the direction is clear. As a new generation of practitioners move into decision-making roles, as clients increasingly expect digital access to their records, and as platforms like Unity® Entity Management demonstrate the benefits of technology, the calculus shifts.

For Preti Flaherty, that shift has already happened. Must-have original paper records might still be in the vault, but they're no longer the system.