KPFF Replaced Microsoft SharePoint With Files.com Data Rooms for Multi-Party Litigation Production

KPFF Consulting Engineers is a multidisciplinary engineering consultancy with roughly 1,300 employees across the United States. Its structural and civil engineers provide project design and forensic engineering services.

Decades of built work produce a second kind of engagement alongside design: forensic engineering. When a structure fails or a project ends up in dispute, KPFF engineers study the full documentary record of the case to form opinions about what happened. Sometimes the disputed project is one KPFF itself performed, and the demand from the other side is simple: everything the firm has. Either way, the work runs on the same thing — entire project file sets moving between KPFF offices and out to consultants, clients, and law firms, with each outside party limited to its portion of the record.

When Opposing Counsel Wants Every File on the Server

The project record lives on KPFF's office file servers. Producing it for a case means pulling large sets of files off those servers and getting them to people outside the firm. KPFF ran that exchange on SharePoint, its general collaboration platform, and SharePoint had stopped doing the job.

“Everyone was having a tough time uploading and downloading, files weren't getting transferred, and the file names were too long.”

This was not an inconvenience the firm could work around, because document production is not optional work. When a lawsuit names one of your own projects, the files must move on the schedule the case sets.

Underneath the failed transfers sat a structural problem. The people on the other end of a production are outside counsel, client attorneys, and consultants: no KPFF systems access, no training on KPFF's tools, and no patience for a portal that fights them. Each case involves several of these parties, and each needs to see only its own portion of the record. Allwardt had no workable way to share documents externally while controlling who could see what. KPFF was asking a collaboration platform, built for people inside one organization, to run controlled multi-party exchange with people outside it.

A Data Room per Case, Scoped by Group

What the practice needed was specific. Something that could hold the complete record for a case in one place. Something that put a boundary around each party's view, so opposing counsel, the client's attorneys, and outside consultants each saw their portion and nothing else. And something that worked in a browser, for a lawyer who will never install software or get a KPFF network account.

Allwardt selected Files.com to be that production layer and proved it on a live forensic case out of the Sacramento office.

Files for each case came off KPFF's office servers into a dedicated folder on Files.com. Allwardt organized participating KPFF engineers and outside counsel into groups, then used Files.com's group-based folder permissions to define each party's view with one group assignment rather than permissions built person by person.

Outside participants could upload and retrieve case files directly through the browser, using their credentials or a Files.com share link. Engineers loaded the record, Allwardt reviewed what arrived, and each outside team gained access to the files it needed without KPFF shepherding every transfer.

From One Live Case to Three Offices

With the workflow in production, KPFF replaced an exchange its own Managing Principal had declared not working with a repeatable production pattern.

• Document production now runs end to end instead of stalling on failed transfers and rejected file names: engineers upload, access is granted per team, and outside counsel retrieves the record themselves.
• People with no KPFF systems access move large case files on their own, without a KPFF engineer shepherding each transfer.
• Per-case administration is group assignment rather than individual-by-individual permissioning, so setting up the next party does not become a permissions project.
• Standing up a new case is a folder and a set of group assignments, which is what let the pattern travel: what began as one live case in Sacramento now runs in Portland and Los Angeles as well.

A Standing Answer to the Production Demand

Today, a demand for the record has a known shape at KPFF. A case folder opens on Files.com, the engineers load the file set, and each party's team sees its portion once access is granted. What that replaced was a scramble on the worst possible timeline: fighting failed transfers and rejected file names through a collaboration platform while law firms waited on the other end.

KPFF did not fix SharePoint, and did not need to. It stopped asking a collaboration platform to do a production system's job. Moving a complete project record to multiple outside parties, each under its own access boundary, is its own kind of work — and one live case was enough to prove the layer that does it before three offices made it theirs.