Overview
Since 1976, Lavallee Brensinger Architects has been recognized as a leading architectural, planning, and interior design firm serving clients throughout New England and beyond. The firm serves communities with distinct studios in Civic + Cultural | Municipal, Healthcare, Higher Education, K-12 Education, Science + Technology, Senior Living, and Workplace.
Lavallee Brensinger Architects (LBA) had used Newforma to manage project correspondence for more than a decade. In spring 2026, the firm moved that record to Cogram, an AI platform for architects and engineers, bringing over nearly 500 projects and 500,000 emails dating back to 2013. Six months later, 93% of the project emails filed at LBA are filed automatically. The archive that once existed mainly for retrieval has become a project knowledge source that staff can question and work with using AI.
Kate Schade, IT/BIM Manager, leads technology initiatives at LBA. She describes her role as the bridge between architecture and technology, helping the firm stay on the leading edge of technology while finding practical ways to use AI, automation, and emerging tools to improve how LBA works.
Her view of AI is practical:
"AI and automation enhances what we do, it doesn't replace it. It's about reducing repetitive administrative work so we can spend more time focused on clients, projects, and great design."
That principle explains much of LBA's move from Newforma to Cogram. Filing project correspondence was necessary work, but in 2026, with modern AI systems, there was little reason for people to spend as much time on it as they did.
How LBA used Newforma
LBA had relied on Newforma since the early 2010s, and staff generally regarded its search as good, much better than Outlook. The difficulty was maintaining the record: Newforma asked users where to file each email, so every message brought with it a small administrative decision. Across an office and over the lifetime of hundreds of projects, the friction of those decisions accumulated.
The result was inconsistent filing. Some people ignored it, others were meticulous, and sometimes several people filed the same correspondence independently.
"There are people that spent zero time on it and filed nothing. Then there are people that overfiled. And then there were double filers. I would file and someone else would file."
Kate felt that the interface was better than Outlook but over time came to think of Newforma as "an electronic dead file and depository." By late 2025 with the rising costs of Newforma, there had to be a better solution out there. While LBA evaluated what would replace Newforma, employees began keeping project correspondence in Outlook folders rather than filing it into the old system for the interim. By the time the firm was ready to switch, several months of email had accumulated in those folders.
TonicDM or Cogram
The choice of a Newforma replacement eventually narrowed to TonicDM or Cogram. LBA already knew Cogram well: Kate and Joe Lonergan, a Principal at LBA and leader of its project management group, had introduced Cogram's tool for automatic meeting minutes in 2024, reducing the time spent on meeting notes by 75%. So the firm had already known the support and the pace of product development that Cogram's team provided.
Email management solved the immediate Newforma problem, while Cogram also gave the firm a way to bring correspondence, meetings and other project information into the same record and use AI across that repository of project knowledge. Kate described that decision for a broader platform:
"Why switch to something that does the same thing, when you can switch to something that gives you so much more, and has so much future capability?"
Kate's preference was to use as few platforms as possible, and make sure those platforms exchange information seamlessly. Cogram's connectors for Deltek Vantagepoint and Autodesk Construction Cloud (recently rebranded to Forma) thus became particularly compelling as LBA prepared to move from Deltek Vision to Vantagepoint and expanded its use of ACC/Forma.
Migrating from Newforma to Cogram
With Newforma, LBA's project correspondence was stored on an on-premise Windows file server, with emails saved as Outlook message files in folders organized by project name and number. Because the server had no direct external access, the migration had to work through LBA's own network. LBA provided a machine inside the network, Cogram connected through the firm's VPN, and the teams began by testing access to the file server and importing a sample of the archive. Active projects were given priority, with the older record to follow. Kate coordinated the work on LBA's side, while Cogram's customer success and technical teams handled the extraction, validation and import.
The source archive was larger and more complex than the final email count suggests. Cogram processed roughly 650,000 candidate email files, tens of thousands of which were identified as duplicates. The archive also contained legacy formats and a small number of files that were not emails. By late April, the bulk import was almost complete, and the remaining exceptions were resolved without holding up the rollout. In total, more than half a million emails spanning nearly 500 projects were imported into Cogram.
A few parts of the archive needed separate treatment. One was an internal collection of more than a decade of correspondence with software vendors, which had been stored differently from the main project record and therefore could not simply follow the same migration path. Cases like this were handled separately while the main archive moved ahead. What mattered for the office was that, by the time staff began using Cogram in May, their project history was already there.
The migration was completed within three weeks. During that period, Cogram and LBA held a weekly 45-minute check-in to review progress, resolve exceptions and keep the rollout on schedule.
From manual filing to automatic filing
Kate explained the new workflow to staff with a line that was only slightly exaggerated:
"File five emails, and you won't have to do anything ever again."
Cogram's AI filing capability uses project numbers, names, directory entries, and the full context of an email to recognize which project an email should be filed to: as of September, 93% of all emails filed at LBA since June were filed automatically.
The new system also removed one of the stranger inefficiencies of the old process: because Cogram indicates that an email has already been filed, colleagues no longer have to guess whether someone else has preserved the same message.
For LBA, automatic filing raised an obvious question: what should happen to email that should never become part of a project record? Correspondence involving owners, HR or Finance may contain project names and other contextual clues while still being confidential. This was discussed before the rollout, and LBA deliberately did not treat automation as an all-or-nothing setting. Kate preferred to have Cogram work across her inbox automatically, while users dealing with more sensitive correspondence could restrict Cogram to a designated Outlook folder and choose which messages entered the automatic filing workflow. LBA could also exclude specified senders from automatic filing through Cogram's administration dashboard.
The distinction reflects the firm's attitude to automation: the aim was not to remove human control wherever possible, but to remove routine decisions where there was little value in making those decisions manually.
From email archive to project intelligence
In Newforma, the principal value of filing email was to have a record that could be searched. Cogram extends the idea of such a project archive to a record that enables project intelligence. With Cogram automatically documenting meetings and filing project emails, Cogram's AI agents have full context on project correspondence and can retrieve information, draft reports, or automate repetitive work for project teams. In Kate's words:
"The biggest change for us is it's not just an archive anymore. You ask it a question across meetings and email and Cogram will compile all that information and summarize it for you."
This began to show up very soon after rollout. In a June check-in, only a few weeks after the firm started to use Cogram for email management, Kate was already asking how somebody could get a recap of what had happened on a project over the previous week across both meetings and email. The relevant workflow was no longer "find the message"; it was "tell me what happened."
That is useful in ordinary situations that occur constantly in a design practice: someone returns after a week away and needs to catch up. A junior member of a team needs context they were not present to hear. Or someone joins a project midway through and wants to understand how a decision was reached. Instead of asking another person to reconstruct the history, they can go to the record themselves.
"Instead of searching through months of email and meeting notes to try to figure out what happened and when, they can just ask Cogram to summarize it."
Meetings now form a substantial part of that record as well. LBA has used Cogram to draft meeting minutes in roughly 2,000 hours of meetings over the last twelve months. Kate's description of the change is perhaps the simplest one:
"The goal is no longer just to file the project record. It's to make the record useful."
What's next
LBA is in the process of migrating from their Deltek Vision ERP to Deltek Vantagepoint. When that migration is complete—which is expected in Q4 2026—LBA plans to integrate Cogram with Vantagepoint using Cogram's Vantagepoint connector. Projects that are created in Vantagepoint then automatically become available in Cogram for email filing; projects that are closed out in Vantagepoint automatically close out in Cogram. Project membership can also be synchronized between the ERP and Cogram, to minimize administrative burden.
For a firm that had spent more than a decade building its project record in Newforma, the success of the move to Cogram was not just that the old information migrated to a modern platform, but that maintaining the record now takes substantially less work, while the information has become considerably easier to use and legible to AI.
Asked what she would say to firms that are on Newforma and thinking about switching, Kate says:
"If you're still using Newforma, I'd encourage you to think beyond just replacing your email filing system. Look at what AI and automation can do with that information once it's filed. For us, Cogram isn't just about filing emails, it's about connecting emails and meeting notes so our teams can quickly understand what's happening on a project without having to dig through months of information."
Kate has offered to talk with other firms considering the same move. If you're on Newforma and want to hear how it went from someone who has done it, we're happy to connect you. You can also read our guide to evaluating Newforma alternatives or book a migration assessment.
About Lavallee Brensinger Architects
To see the firm's projects and studios, visit lbpa.com.
About Cogram
Since 2021, Cogram has built AI tools for architects and engineers. Leading architecture and engineering firms use Cogram to manage project work across email, meetings, RFIs and submittals, field reports, and other project information.
September 2026