By Legal Futures’ Associate Quill
Digitisation is the process of moving from “paper” to ”data”. Businesses of all types, law firms included, are embarking upon projects to introduce electronic working and achieve their paperless office goals for a whole multitude of reasons. The primary vehicle for doing so is document management software (DMS).
Take our Interactive Documents as an example of DMS software that’s been designed specifically for the legal profession. A key component of our Interactive Cloud suite, the system comprises case management and legal accounting functionality on top of document management capabilities. That means it delivers an expansive range of benefits to clients who are effectively able to implement one fully integrated, easy-to-use application to manage their entire business whilst at the same time eliminating paper-based processes.
In this latest instalment of helpful tips, here are ten good reasons to choose DMS in your practice…
1. Improve efficiencies
The main driver is usually wanting to work smarter and be more productive. After all, the less time you spend creating, storing, sharing and searching for documents, including sending and recovering archived files, the more time you spend earning fees. Or performing any other task pertinent to managing and growing your business.
2. Expand profits
Following on nicely from #1, any DMS worth its salt allows time recording capture when producing, sending, uploading and receiving documents and correspondence. By doing so, claim back all monies due and maximise your earning potential.
3. Save money
Not only can you generate more revenue, you can save money too thereby boosting your bank balance even higher into the black. With DMS, reduce your overheads by paying an affordable monthly subscription for a cloud-based set up which is £tens-of-thousands less than in-house servers, bulky storage cabinets and associated office space, and off-site archiving solutions.
4. Increase mobility
By logging in via the internet, access your documents (and contacts, matters and finances!) from any place, at any time, on any device. Your staff instantly become more mobile and you establish closer links between multiple sites.
5. Collaborate better
Share documents internally with a central store of everything filed according to live and complete matters. Circulate documents to third parties by utilising convert-to-PDF and zip-and-attach features.
6. Enhance accuracy
Introduce business automation by setting up popular document templates, automatically populating with database content, and assigning tasks and diary notes with relevant documents for yourself and others. That way, avoid data input errors and never miss important case actions.
7. Tighten security
Exploit your cloud provider’s industrial-strength security measures, ISO certifications and state-of-the-art technologies to become more resilient. Apply user authentication and role-based authorisation at application layer for even further protection.
8. Introduce business continuity
If your DMS supplier has sound emergency planning and disaster recovery processes already in place, you automatically inherit these simply by becoming a client. That’s your business continuity strategy sorted.
9. Rely on on-demand support
It’s naïve to assume that you’ll never suffer any technical hiccups. Even the most robust systems go awry occasionally. Technical support team working hours, out-of-hours emergency contact details and target-to-repair times will be defined in your Service Level Agreement.
10. Enjoy automatic software updates
Another huge advantage of a virtual environment is the ability for software enhancements to be automatically implemented without any intervention on your part. Be confident that you’re always running the latest software release, avoiding any disruption, downtime or upgrade charges.
It goes without saying that these benefits are satisfied by Interactive Documents. Our DMS add-ins are the bridge that interfaces between Word and Outlook on the one hand with Interactive Cloud on the other. To put this into perspective, once an email has been initiated from a case, all subsequent emails in the conversation are automatically saved to Interactive and time is recorded without any further user intervention. Similarly, document templates can be mapped to standard and custom fields from Interactive by embedding our unique itags within your firm’s templates and precedents. And when it comes to sending documents to clients, users have the choice of using a native document format or finalising the format through conversion to PDF.
As if these ten reasons aren’t incentive enough, where Quill’s concerned, there’s an additional reason… experience true one-stop-shop support. You see, with Quill, as well as getting one application to cater for all your practice management requirements, outsourced services are readily available too. Select from cashiering, payroll and typing assistance for a complete back office infrastructure with one convenient point of contact for your every business need.
To find out more on Interactive Documents, please visit www.quill.co.uk/documents, email info@quill.co.uk or call 0161 236 2910.
