Posted by Melody Easton, marketing programs director, EMEA and Americas, at Legal Futures Associate DocsCorp
Easton: Valuable time is wasted searching for lost documents within a document management system.
Lawyers who can manage their documents from creation to completion are becoming increasingly important for firms, particularly if a firm has a remote or distributed workforce and access to help desk and IT staff isn’t as convenient as it once was.
For every firm, however, it means secretaries and legal assistants can prioritise high-value work, and lawyers can get on with focusing on the law.
Simplify document creation
Creating standard legal documents needn’t be a complicated or time-consuming job. Providing lawyers access to templates means they only have to answer a few quick questions to make their document.
Template management software helps users create documents quickly and ensures the finished product is consistent across different business units. Branding and house styles can be pre-applied to the templates, so lawyers don’t have to worry about reformatting.
Using the same software, firms can give lawyers quick access to centralised content libraries with pre-approved text. From a pane in Microsoft Word, they can drag and drop clauses, paragraphs and terms to build out their document.
Speed up document review
Lawyers will share the documents they create with clients and external counsel to review and finalise.
Document comparison software gives lawyers the tools to quickly compare different versions shared in the review phase. Often, one of these parties will forget to turn on ‘Track Changes’. Or they may convert the document to a PDF.
Comparison software offers an accurate and reliable method to see every change, no matter the file type.
Make email more secure
When lawyers share documents with clients and external parties over email, there is always a risk of inadvertently leaking highly sensitive information. Usually, it’s a result of sending the email to the wrong person or attaching the wrong file.
Email security software helps protect lawyers from unknowingly causing a breach. It alerts users if it looks like their email isn’t going to the right person or if the attachment contains potentially sensitive metadata. It means lawyers can work quickly with the protection of intelligent checks and alerts.
Make court bundle creation easier
Creating court bundles can take hours or even days. Since lawyers are often working to a deadline, last-minute changes to a bundle can wreak havoc.
PDF bundling software creates empowers legal professionals to create searchable court bundles in minutes, not hours. Users can manage all the files related to a case in one workspace, keeping them in their original file formats until they are ready to produce the bundle.
As part of the bundling process, the software auto-generates a table of contents, bookmarks and indexes. Bates numbering can also be auto-applied as part of the process.
Users can create court bundles from templates, with the flexibility to make changes as needed. The final PDF can be output as a single document or a multiple PDF binder when working with many very large documents.
Eliminate downtime searching for documents
Valuable time is wasted searching for lost documents within a document management system.
These non-searchable files are usually scanned documents or image-based PDFs that are just a picture of text. They lack the necessary text layer required for search technology to find them.
If lawyers can’t search for on-page content, like client or company names, it makes finding relevant files difficult.
Automated OCR software converts both new and legacy non-searchable files to searchable PDFs, so lawyers can search for on-page content in 100% of documents.
Not only does automated OCR software ensure lawyers can find relevant information, but it also helps firms comply with data retention and data protection regulations, including the GDPR.
These are only some of the ways document productivity software can help lawyers work smarter with documents.
Download the new guide from DocsCorp to discover more productivity-boosting solutions for every stage of the document lifecycle.
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