Taking a Step Ahead in Legal Document Management
It is a known fact that the legal firms and departments work under tremendous pressure. The document workload continues to increase at a rapid pace and so do the regulatory burdens. The risks are mounting with each passing day as well. But one thing that does not increase at such a pace is obviously your budget. So how do you end up tackling such a situation, especially when you have to accomplish a lot more with far less number of resources without losing control over the legal documents at any point of time? It is time you should start looking for a legal document management system.
As the owner or the proprietor of a law firm, you are stuck in a situation where you have:
- A number of deals to manage
- Increased in-house work
- A number of documents to create and subsequently negotiate
- Complicated internal approvals
- Less flexibility
- Less time
- Budget constraints
- Complicated business models
- Increased system risks
The employment of a dedicated team of administrative staff exclusively assigned the task of storing and handling of documents has become a thing of the past. Tasks such as copying, scanning, faxing and subsequently filing of documents and delivering them to lawyers, done manually previously are considered to be tedious and also take up a lot of your valuable time. It turns out to be far more expensive in the longer run.
Most of the leading law firms across the globe are choosing to go for automated solutions. This would automatically streamline the operations and make activities such as the routing, handling, storage and distribution of documents easy. As the owner of a law firm, you would end up saving a lot on document storage and delivery and at the same time ensuring the fact that they are completely accessible as and when the need for the same arises.
It is necessary to define the document lifecycles and to distribute them. You also need to plan for it separately, in case the documents need to be incorporated into a document management system. You also need to figure out whether any special classifications need to be made and whether the system has specific security needs of its own.
You need to make the documents easily accessible and at the same time ensure that they are completely safe. You also need to take into consideration the organisational value and the ease with which documents can be shared and stored. It is necessary to develop a matter centric system which follows best practices and thus reduces the time required to accomplish a specific task.
Following best practices would ensure that the storage costs would be minimised considerably. Less use of printed documents reduces the need for additional storage space and as a result reduces organisational costs.. The best way to handle the process of transition, one from paper documents to electronic documents is the use of a legal document management tool that helps in the automatic profiling of the documents and their subsequent filing into a matter-centric management system in one step. Once the documents are processed, they can be easily despatched to multiple destinations through network folders and email.