Document management in legal offices and firms is often difficult with issues such as handling and storage of the sheer amount of paperwork and filing process of legal documents. Legal document scanning and other electronic document management solutions are making things a lot easier for every law firm.
Technology is so advanced that even paperless trials are possible now. Law Times News recently reported that paperless trials have been run in Ontario courts in some cases. During this trial, electronic documents can be accessed easily via iPads not only for the lawyers but also for the judge and the witnesses. However, document preparation requires co-ordination between among all concerned from a very early stage itself.
As information contained in each legal file may still be valuable in the future, it is important to preserve them. Electronic data management solutions are especially helpful for firms striving to ensure data security, compliance, access, version control, disaster recovery and cost.
Johnson Winter & Slattery (JWS) Law Firm Uses Technology to Manage Data
A leading independent Australian law firm Johnson Winter & Slattery (JWS) that handles a staggering volume of documents is now using a reliable document management solution to deliver great client work.
The firm has offices in Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney, and includes 62 partners supported by over 200 lawyers, business development, finance, HR and IT professionals. They faced many issues with their existing document management system such as functionality and usability problems as well as speed and performance issues, resulting in very low user adoption. The Chief Information Officer of this firm conducted a firm-wide survey asking what features were most important in a new DMS and placed this data into a results trace ability matrix.
Along with successfully adopting advanced scanning technology and OCR workflow for ingestion of documents into the new document management system, the company succeeded in rolling it out to nearly 250 users, achieving 100% adoption. The solutions deployed by JWS include:
- Those for document and email management
- Those that provide employees access to their work product at any time, from any location, and
- Those facilitating enterprise-wide search
With these solutions, the firm’s Help desk calls related to DMS issues reduced by 70-80%, and end users can perform their core functions more effectively and access critical work files from any location, enhancing work/life balance. Also, Level 2 and Level 3 engineers can proactively focus on higher value activities that drive the business forward. Unlocking the cache of information allows them to compete more effectively with other firms.
Legal document conversion services also help legal entities convert their hard copy documents into the required electronic formats, thus reducing back log and improving processes, productivity, efficiency and workflow. Outsourced solutions such as these, as well as reliable document management solutions help organizations streamline and simplify day-to-day tasks and make important work products easy to save, file, organize and search.
