iManage Closing Folders
tl;dr
- As the company’s first product designer, I helped shape the product from its growth phase through acquisition and subsequent maturation within iManage.
- Led research, design, and analytics on many large, high stakes features.
- Key contributor to company wide design initiatives that influenced other products across the iManage portfolio.
Closing Folders is software that helps corporate lawyers manage deals. Started by two lawyers in 2013, the company was market leader in Canada by 2019, counting most of Canada’s largest law firms as customers. The company was acquired by iManage in the summer of 2020, which fast-tracked expansion into new markets and positioned Closing Folders as a global leader in legal transaction management.
For 7 years I led product design for the team. My work touched every corner of the product, and I came to know it, and our customers, very well. We built a highly productive team, consistently delivering features that drove adoption with existing customers and growth within the wider legal market.
Geoff was a key player in the evolution of Closing Folders. His contributions crossed many domains within the company, from product design and product management through to marketing and support. His design work always accounted for technical and resource constraints, helping us ship features crucial to growing the business.
He’s the Swiss Army knife of designers.
Gordon Cassie, Co-founder & CTO, Closing FoldersHighlights
- Designed and managed the addition of granular role based access control (RBAC) across the entire application (an epic 12+ month initiative from ideation to release).
- Conceptualized and designed the Advanced Signature Detection feature (AI assisted signature detection). This was the first AI augmented feature within the product.
- Designed the core integration between iManage Work and Closing Folders following the acquisition.
Responsibilities
- Feature discovery and usability research
- UX and UI design
- Prototyping
- Drafting and maintaining requirement docs
- Pre and post release quality assurance
- Product analytics
- Branding and copywriting
- Hiring and managing designers
Access control
Weaving granular RBAC into an established system and a customer base with zero tolerance for error.
Access Control was, without question, the most complex project I worked on at iManage. It required significant research and collaboration to scope the feature to serve the majority of our users without leaving us buried in codebase complexity.
After 12 months of intense work the feature was released. Our diligence and commitment to tight constraints paid off. Adoption was strong across existing customers almost immediately, while new channels for organic growth were opened as customers could now securely share their deals with external parties.
AI assisted signature detection
In early 2025, a skunkworks project explored whether AI could improve signature detection accuracy and reduce downstream formatting time in DocuSign.
The feature proved functionally and commercially viable, and was released in the early autumn of that year. Adoption has been strong, with roughly half of our customers using the new AI-based flow. It was the second AI-integrated feature shipped at iManage, a meaningful milestone in an industry hungry for real world AI use cases.
Multi-factor authentication
While most customers’ internal users authenticated via SSO, we regularly got requests from firms asking to implement MFA for external parties. We introduced optional MFA for Closing Folders customers in 2023.
Closing books
Closing Books are a crucial milestone in the Closing Folders workflow. It’s where every deal ends; a point of relief and celebration for deal teams. I was tasked with re-evaluating the closing book workflow, improving index formatting and adding a visual editor for cover pages.
This was an exercise in restraint, where most of the challenge lay in where I could take things away and simplify. When functionality was added, it was done with an eye for minimal disruption to the underlying workflow. This approach proved very successful. Users appreciated that the core behaviour remained unchanged, with enhancements gracefully layered on top.
iManage Work integration
iManage’s market-leading DMS software, Work, serves as the single source of truth for a firm’s documents. But to perform deal-specific tasks, lawyers need to move those documents into Closing Folders.
I was responsible for designing the new integration between the two products. It was the first major release following the acquisition, and one critical to driving Closing Folders adoption across iManage’s existing customer base.
Other notable projects
Signature page generator
Eliminate the tedium of manual signature page creation; generate pages dynamically within Closing Folders.
Signature status
Keeping users up to date with the status of signature packages delivered with DocuSign and OneSpan.
Agenda importer
A tool that makes transferring closing agendas from Microsoft Word to Closing Folders, simple.
Advanced variables
A dashboard so users can easily manage deal wide variables across all documents.