"Now employees are asking for advanced Nitro PDF Professional training because they learned the basics so quickly," says Lobel."
Richard Lobel
Senior Technical Trainer
Davis Wright Tremaine

The problem

Davis Wright Tremaine LLP is a national law firm representing businesses based throughout the United States and internationally. The firm has 13 offices including one in Shanghai, China, and over 1000 employees.

In 2005, DWT made the decision to equip a large number of staff with PDF creation and editing software, and after extensive evaluation, decided on Nitro PDF Professional.

One of the key challenges during the implementation was to ensure that employees understood and could quickly utilize a new PDF application. Adoption needed to be user-driven, firm-wide, and swift. DWT required that the software integrate seamlessly with existing applications.

For a firm that processes thousands of legal documents every week, the chosen PDF solution had to powerful, reliable, stable and easy to use.

DWT was also determined to select a solution that would continue to offer strong value for money, when considering factors such as upgrades and support.

"As a technical trainer, it was very important to me that the solution we offered to employees would not require them to incur significant downtime in training. We wanted staff to be able to start using the product immediately upon rollout," said Richard Lobel, Senior Technical Trainer.

In addition, Lobel noted that he also wanted the solution to have advanced features available for employees to use once they had mastered the basics.

"Because of the nature of our work, we had to ensure that the PDF solution we selected was able to deliver features that supported our advanced level of PDF usage. It was important from a training and support perspective that the software was as easy to use as possible," said Lobel.

Critical, practical features that DWT needed addressed by the selected PDF solution were:

• Fully-featured markup and commenting tools.
• Powerful and flexible document security tools.
• Advanced document merging tools.
• Scan-to-PDF functionality.

The solution

Upon deciding to implement a Nitro PDF Software solution, and developing an organization-wide training program for the firm, Lobel wanted to be certain that all the offices utilizing Nitro PDF Professional would be able to maintain the use of the product beyond the classroom.

"We have a highly complex document management system and we are required to save and archive all the documents we process. In addition, our staff is made up of users at very different levels and we needed a program that would meet those levels and enable them all to do their job," noted Lobel.

During the evaluation process the company felt Nitro PDF Professional met and exceeded several critical requirements including:

• Ease of use.
• Powerful PDF document manipulation tools.
• Strong support systems.
• Ease of training and implementation.
• Long-term cost viability.

DWT employees quickly learned the basics of Nitro PDF Professional and were excited to be utilizing such an intuitive PDF program, said Lobel. The time spent learning the program was much less than Lobel had anticipated and the firm's Nitro Pro training programs were very heavily booked with employees eager to begin using the software.

Results

Deploying Nitro PDF Professional has transformed the way Davis Wright Tremaine works with electronic documents, and the transformation has been heavily influenced by the users themselves.

"When I'm giving my classes in Nitro Pro one of the best things about the application is how user friendly it remains. It also encourages employees to delve deeper into what the solution can do because of its ease of usability. I'm now offering advanced courses in the application and the classes fill up quickly," says Lobel.

And as the firm grows, so too does the demand for Nitro PDF Professional, according to Lobel.

"We continue to have our employees ask for more licenses of Nitro Pro, because they see how user-friendly it is. As a technical trainer, you don't often see this type of response when you're first implementing a program. But the results have been very good thus far," Lobel says.

Additionally, Nitro PDF Professional has enabled much more efficient document archiving, file sharing and collaboration among clients and peer offices in other locations. The security of the PDF files created with Nitro Pro has also enabled the firm to ensure that every file generated meets the demanding standards of proprietary protection that exist within the legal sector.

With the adoption of Nitro PDF Professional DWT was able to:

• Securely and reliably create, protect and archive PDF documents.
• Encourage electronic document sharing and collaboration between offices across the US and the rest of the world.
• Offer an easy-to-use, affordable PDF solution to DWT's ever-expanding workforce.
• Save countless hours on technical support because of Nitro Pro's ease of use, ease of integration, and user-driven adoption.