iManage vs NetDocuments vs SharePoint for Document Management in a UK Law Firm Under 50 Fee Earners

If you run a UK law firm with fewer than 50 fee earners and your current document management system is a collection of shared network drives, Outlook folders, and someone's filing convention that nobody else follows, you need a proper DMS. The three platforms worth considering are iManage Work, NetDocuments, and SharePoint Online. iManage and NetDocuments are built specifically for legal work. SharePoint is not, but it is already included in your Microsoft 365 subscription, which makes it tempting. Here is what each one actually does, what it costs, and where each one lets you down.

What These Platforms Actually Are

iManage Work is a document and email management system built for law firms and professional services. It organises everything around matters — every document, email, and file associated with a case lives in a matter workspace. iManage started as on-premises software and now runs primarily as iManage Cloud, hosted in data centres including a UK region. It handles document profiling, version control, email filing from Outlook, and ethical walls between matters.

NetDocuments is a cloud-native legal DMS that has never had an on-premises version. Like iManage, it organises work around matters (called "workspaces" in NetDocuments). It includes email filing through ndMail, document comparison, and collaboration features. NetDocuments runs on AWS and has UK-region data storage available.

SharePoint Online is part of Microsoft 365 and provides general-purpose document storage and collaboration. It is not designed for legal work, but it can be configured with matter-centric folder structures, metadata, and retention policies. Out of the box, SharePoint does not understand what a matter is, does not file emails automatically, and does not provide ethical walls.

Pricing for a 30-Person Firm

None of these vendors publish fixed price lists, so the figures below are based on UK channel partner quotes and industry benchmarks for a firm with 30 fee earners plus 10 support staff (40 users total).

iManage Cloud typically costs £30 to £50 per user per month through a UK channel partner, with pricing varying by partner and contract length. For 40 users at a midpoint of £40 per user, that is £1,600 per month or £19,200 per year before VAT. Add a one-off migration and setup fee of £8,000 to £15,000 depending on how much legacy data you have.

NetDocuments typically costs £35 to £55 per user per month for UK firms, again depending on the edition (Standard, Advanced, or Enterprise) and contract length. For 40 users at a midpoint of £45 per user, that is £1,800 per month or £21,600 per year before VAT. Migration and onboarding costs are similar to iManage — £8,000 to £12,000 for a firm this size.

SharePoint Online comes included with Microsoft 365 Business Standard (£9.60 per user per month) or Business Premium (£16.90 per user per month). You are already paying for it. The catch is that using SharePoint as a legal DMS requires customisation: metadata schemas, matter templates, retention policies aligned to SRA rules, and usually a third-party add-on for email filing and document profiling. Budget £10,000 to £25,000 for a consultant to build this out, plus £5 to £15 per user per month for add-ons like Colligo, MacroView, or Prosperoware. The "free" DMS quickly costs £200 to £600 per user per year on top of your existing M365 bill.

Matter-Centric Organisation

This is where iManage and NetDocuments pull away from SharePoint.

Both iManage and NetDocuments create a workspace for every matter that automatically inherits the right security permissions, folder structure, and metadata. When a solicitor opens a new matter, the DMS creates the workspace from a template — client name, matter number, matter type, responsible fee earner. Every document and email filed to that matter is searchable, versioned, and access-controlled.

SharePoint can replicate this with custom site templates and metadata columns, but it requires someone to build and maintain the templates, enforce naming conventions, and train every user on where to save files. In a firm with 30 fee earners, that someone is usually the practice manager or an external IT consultant. Neither has spare time.

The practical difference: in iManage or NetDocuments, a new starter can find a document from a 2019 conveyancing matter in under 30 seconds. In a SharePoint deployment that has drifted from its original structure — and they all drift — that search takes five minutes and two phone calls.

Email Filing

Law firms live in Outlook. The ability to file emails (and their attachments) to the correct matter without leaving Outlook is the single feature that determines whether lawyers will actually use a DMS.

iManage integrates with Outlook through iManage Work for Desktop and iManage Drive. Filing an email to a matter is a right-click action. Suggested filing uses AI to predict the correct matter based on recipient, subject, and content.

NetDocuments uses ndMail, which sits in the Outlook toolbar and files emails with one click. ndMail can also auto-file based on rules — any email from a particular client domain goes to their matter automatically.

SharePoint has no built-in email filing. You can drag and drop emails into a SharePoint library from Outlook, but they lose their metadata. Third-party tools (Colligo, MacroView, Prosperoware) add proper email filing, but each costs £5 to £15 per user per month and adds another vendor relationship to manage.

For a 30-fee-earner firm, email filing is not optional. If your DMS does not make it effortless, solicitors will keep everything in their personal Outlook folders, and your matter files will be incomplete from day one.

SRA Compliance and Security

The SRA does not mandate a specific DMS, but it does require firms to protect client information, maintain adequate records, and demonstrate that they can respond to data subject access requests. The SRA's January 2026 guidance on remote working security further tightened expectations around document access controls and audit trails.

iManage and NetDocuments both provide ethical walls (restricting access to matters where conflicts exist), full audit trails of who accessed what and when, retention policies that can be set per matter type, and granular permission controls down to individual documents. Both platforms are ISO 27001 certified and offer UK data residency.

SharePoint provides audit logging through Microsoft Purview, retention policies through Microsoft 365 compliance tools, and access controls through SharePoint permissions. These are genuine enterprise-grade security features. The gap is that SharePoint does not understand legal concepts — it cannot enforce an ethical wall between matters without custom configuration, and its audit logs are not structured around matters.

If the SRA asks you to produce every document related to a specific client matter, iManage and NetDocuments can generate that report in minutes. SharePoint requires a search across sites, libraries, and potentially personal OneDrive accounts, with manual verification that nothing has been missed.

Version Control and Document Comparison

Both iManage and NetDocuments track every version of every document automatically. Check out a document, edit it, check it back in — the DMS keeps the full history. NetDocuments includes built-in document comparison. iManage integrates with Workshare (now part of Litera) for comparisons.

SharePoint has version history, and it works well for basic use. Where it falls short is check-in/check-out discipline — SharePoint defaults to co-authoring mode, which is excellent for collaborative editing but terrible for legal documents where you need to know exactly who changed what and when. Turning off co-authoring and enforcing check-out is possible but creates friction that lawyers will work around.

Search and Retrieval

Finding documents across thousands of matters is where a DMS earns its keep.

iManage uses full-text search combined with metadata filters — matter number, client name, document type, author, date range. Its AI-powered search (iManage RAVN) learns from user behaviour and surfaces relevant documents before you finish typing. For a litigation firm pulling together a bundle, this is the difference between two hours and twenty minutes.

NetDocuments offers similar search capabilities with its ndSearch feature, including full-text, metadata, and Boolean operators. NetDocuments also provides search within email threads, which is useful when a matter's correspondence runs to hundreds of emails.

SharePoint search works through Microsoft Search, which indexes content across your M365 tenant. It is a good general-purpose search engine, but it does not filter by matter unless your metadata schema is rigorously maintained. In practice, SharePoint search returns excess results from unrelated sites and libraries, and solicitors waste time sifting through irrelevant hits.

Training and Adoption

The best DMS is the one your solicitors actually use. This sounds obvious, but adoption failure is the primary reason law firm DMS projects do not deliver their expected return.

iManage has an advantage for firms hiring laterals from larger practices — anyone who worked at a top-100 UK firm almost certainly used iManage, so the training curve is minimal. For staff who have never used a legal DMS, iManage's Outlook connector is intuitive enough that basic email filing and document retrieval can be taught in a half-day session.

NetDocuments requires slightly more training because its interface differs from the traditional Windows file explorer model. That said, its browser-based design means there is no desktop client to install or maintain, which reduces IT overhead.

SharePoint's training challenge is different. Every solicitor already knows how to use SharePoint for basic file storage. The problem is getting them to use it the legal way — filing to the correct matter site, adding metadata, using check-in/check-out instead of co-authoring. Without ongoing reinforcement, SharePoint deployments regress to their pre-DMS state within six months.

The Legal Aid Agency Factor

If your firm does legal aid work, the Legal Aid Agency's digital requirements increasingly expect structured matter records that can be audited remotely. iManage and NetDocuments matter workspaces align naturally with LAA audit requirements because every document is tagged to a matter with dates, authors, and version history.

SharePoint can meet these requirements, but only if your matter structure is properly maintained — which brings us back to the governance problem.

What Changes as You Grow from 20 to 50 Fee Earners

At 20 fee earners, the cost difference between SharePoint (with add-ons) and a dedicated legal DMS feels noticeable. At 50 fee earners, the maths shift.

A firm growing from 20 to 50 fee earners on iManage sees costs scale linearly — add users, pay per user. The matter structure and security model scale without additional configuration.

The same firm on SharePoint finds that the customisations built for a 20-person firm need reworking: site structures that made sense for five practice areas do not work for ten, permission models need restructuring, and the third-party add-ons need reconfiguring. The consultant who built the original setup charges another £10,000 to £15,000 for the redesign.

By the time you reach 40 fee earners, a purpose-built legal DMS typically costs less per year than a properly configured SharePoint deployment — and it works better.

The Honest Assessment

Choose iManage if your firm handles complex, high-value work where ethical walls, document security, and audit trails are non-negotiable. iManage has the deepest ties to legal workflows and the largest partner network in the UK. It is also the platform that laterals from larger firms expect to find.

Choose NetDocuments if you want a cloud-native platform with no on-premises baggage, strong email filing, and built-in document comparison. NetDocuments is particularly strong for firms that operate across multiple offices or have remote workers, because it was designed for browser-based access from the start.

Choose SharePoint only if your firm's work is low-complexity, your budget genuinely cannot stretch to a dedicated DMS, and you are willing to invest in proper configuration and ongoing governance. Do not choose SharePoint because it is "free" — it is not free once you add the customisation and add-ons needed to make it work for legal document management.

For a UK firm with 30 to 50 fee earners doing contentious or transactional work, the right answer is almost always iManage or NetDocuments. The annual cost difference between a dedicated legal DMS and a properly configured SharePoint is smaller than you think, and the productivity difference is larger than you expect.