This year, full service Middle East firm Al Tamimi & Company made the shift from iManage to Epona365, a legal document and matter management platform built natively on Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Online.
One of the key themes that came out of Legal IT Insider’s 30th anniversary event in October and from 2025 in general was the desire among firms to align more closely with Microsoft. With this in mind, Legal IT Insider spoke with Al Tamimi’s chief information officer Colin Short about the rationale behind the move and the learnings to date.
Al Tamimi already had Microsoft E5 licensing and Short said: “We started to ask if we could just take our data into Microsoft and use it there with all of the tools we already have and start to get ROI on the value of those tools, instead of having to buy extra. We decided the way to go was to align closer to Microsoft and make our data more accessible to our user base and not be tied into any specific vendor.”
Once that decision was made, Short says, it was a case of which vendor the firm used for the matter management side of things. He says: “We looked at various products including Intapp and MacroView and obviously Epona and a few others, and we narrowed it down and did an in-depth POC on each of them. We brought in the secretaries. We brought in the lawyers. And we then gave them access to each of the platforms. We did also include iManage online. And we set our people a whole lot of tests and exercises over a year. At the end of it, we gave them an assessment and a rating, and the business chose to go with Epona.”
Short says that while iManage has a lot of really good functionality and is progressing, one of the issues for Al Tamimi was its support model and having to deal with a third party rather than iManage directly. “Epona’s support is done by Epona and we’ve been co-developing with them,” Short said. “If we say, ‘this functionality is not there and this is why we need it,’ they go, ‘oh, that’s a good idea’ and build it right into their product. That type of collaboration is critical to make sure that we progress, and the functionality ticks the right boxes.”
He adds: “Don’t get me wrong, we’re still miles away from where we need to be, but they are progressive enough and responsive enough to see that there is benefit to working with the likes of us to drive their product development.”
In terms of the change management that has been involved, Short says: “The way that Microsoft do versioning and iManage do versioning is different and it was a bit of a change for our users to get used to, and Epona has done some work to help us with that. But overall compliance is much better because this system is seamless and close to Windows, which people are familiar with. We’ve made it as easy as possible for people to use and over the last six or seven months in we’re seeing a better uptake in usage of the system than we did on iManage.”
In terms of scalability, Short says that Al Tamimi’s size is on the upper scale for SharePoint, observing: “We’ve got 17 offices across 10 countries and 1200 or so users. I think that we are pushing the envelope in terms of size of firm that would work well in SharePoint and if I was working at a larger firm than us, I think I would be a lot more cautious. One issue is also the file lengths – in iManage you can save files as long as you want but SharePoint is tough that way. If I was sat in another law firm of 2,000 users would I still go to SharePoint? Probably not.”
One of the risk factors around becoming an all in Microsoft shop, is that if there is a worldwide Microsoft problem, users will not be able to access their files. Short says: “The reality is we had that in July last year where CrowdStrike took everyone down and we’ll just have to deal with that going forward. That’s just the way the world is. But I think for our firm the benefit of the cost; the benefit of the convenience of being able to access your files from anywhere on the planet; the benefit of it being closer to the user expectation of how to handle files; and the benefit of plugging it into directly into Copilot without difficulty and then using the Copilot Studio and all of the AI type functionality to try to try interrogate your files will definitely outweigh the potential problems.”
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