Mitchell Hayes

Mitchell Hayes is a financial consultancy focused on assisting clients who are in the midst of a major life transition. These transitions take many forms; divorce, retirement, loss of a spouse or partner, or a move to assisted living. While the circumstances of life’s changes can vary significantly, all of these transitions require financial planning.

Situation

On a daily basis, Wendy Hayes, the founder of Mitchell Hayes, receives a high volume of very sensitive documents from her clients and their attorneys. Clients send Mitchell Hayes every type of critical document imaginable including tax forms, pay stubs, banking information, social security data, paperwork related to investment assets, and much more. In most cases, clients provided hard copies of these documents or sent them through e-mail. With hundreds of documents for each client, it was very difficult to maintain organization and control over the content. Dedicated to finding a secure way to share information, Mitchell Hayes tried using Dropbox – but after a short stint with the product the firm realized they were not comfortable with the security and were concerned that their client’s sensitive data was not being protected as required by professional codes of conduct and law. Additionally, the file limitations in Dropbox made it difficult to send the variety of relevant documents. The firm needed a secure tool for its clients to send relevant materials with the proper security features to protect their highly sensitive content. 

Solution

Having used Intralinks® Virtual Data Rooms during a due diligence project in her former role as a CFO, Wendy remembered the sophisticated security features and ease of use offered by the Intralinks platform. She realized that ultimately Intralinks delivered the right balance of convenience and security that her organization required to protect the client’s highly valued personal information. Intralinks VIA® provides a seamless way to send a large volume of material. The security and ease-of-use of every solution Mitchell Hayes considered could not compare to the superior features Intralinks delivered. According to a review of our solution by Legal Tech News, “Intralinks VIA makes it easy to synchronize documents between Web-based work spaces, PC desktops and mobile devices. Intralinks software securely shares content and keeps it secure with digital or information rights management (IRM).” The firm was able to adopt Intralinks immediately, and the technology now supports Mitchell Hayes and their clients as they submit their most personal and vulnerable financial data to the firm.

The Result

Deploying Intralinks to Mitchell Hayes has delivered both time savings and overall efficiency to the firm’s day to day business processes. According to founder Wendy Hayes, “Mitchell Hayes has saved 25-30% of their time for document control by using Intralinks.” With hundreds of documents to look through for each client, Intralinks provides a single repository for these documents to be maintained and protected. Being able to search for documents makes it very quick and easy to locate a necessary file. Also, being able to protect a file with IRM provides peace of mind that sensitive material isn’t being left vulnerable to exposure.

Creating a new Intralinks workspace can be done in just minutes – which means every time a new client comes on board they can instantaneously start sending Mitchell Hayes all required material. This material can be organized into various folders with different permissions for each one. Whenever someone uploads a new file or edits an existing file, Intralinks sends a notification to all parties in the workspace to alert them of the changes. According to Wendy, “This is all extremely helpful and time saving to an often critical and time sensitive process.”

If a firm is hacked, they could be exposed to breach of care as well as reputational damage. Using Intralinks, Wendy now has peace-of-mind that their clients’, as well as Mitchell Hayes’ risks, are significantly reduced because they are actively working to maintain care of digital client information, as directed by the American Bar Association’s code of conduct. Wendy’s use of Intralinks has gone so smoothly in terms of ease of use and security that she added, “I trust Intralinks because of my past experience with them and because I have read enough security information to feel confident that the solution is as secure as it possibly can be - which is of the utmost importance to me. I would like to see Intralinks become the data security benchmark for the industry – providing confidence that we are doing everything we can to protect our client’s identities.”