Why Document Management Systems for Law Firms Are Necessary (and What to Look For)
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Without a standardized system for organizing, securing, and retrieving documents, even a small law firm can quickly descend into disorder and confusion. Documents are the lifeblood of any legal enterprise. With that in mind, being able to automate the workflows of the document management systems for law firms is critical.
Law firms are in a unique position when it comes to choosing a document management system. For instance, entrepreneurs and startups often begin with shared file drives and email-based communication. This is easy and cost-efficient – at the beginning at least. For a legal firm, this option is out of the question.
Lawyers can’t implement shared file drives without compromising attorney-client confidentiality. Email folders quickly congest since there is no way to reliably interpret incoming messages by priority and to deposit them into the right inbox with certainty.
Additionally, these ad-hoc options don’t offer version control capabilities, reliable indexing, or meaningful security benefits. Ultimately, lawyers have to hold their IT infrastructure to a higher standard.
Document Management Systems for Law Firms
For busy lawyers and their assistants, the ability to quickly convert documents from paper to various digital formats is an important and valuable benefit. Manual processes for entering data from paper into digital forms are too slow and too inaccurate for the precision required of the legal industry. Because of that, it is important to make this as secure, automated, and efficient as possible.
Document Capture
Since these processes typically constitute non-billable hours, the key to efficient document capture is automating the process. Optical character recognition makes this possible by allowing machines to quickly transform large volumes of paper documents into indexable, editable digital files.
We rely on ABBYY technology for optical character recognition and legal document capture processes. ABBYY’s document management solutions allow law offices to convert documents with ease, automatically enjoying secure document versioning while making collaboration easier than ever before.
Document Index
Indexing ensures that documents do not get lost or misplaced. Legal firms cannot rely on their employees memorizing every aspect of a complex folder system in order to find specific documents in a timely manner. Indexing needs to rely on metadata to create keyword search terms that make documents easy to find whenever needed.
Document Security, Sharing, and Collaboration
Creating a searchable, indexed archive is a key value differentiator for any law firm. However, it can present compliance problems when attention isn’t paid to privacy and security.
In order to offer clients the legal protections they demand, law offices need to implement automated document conversion processes that offer accessibility and security. Kelley Create expertise and ABBYY technology offers on-demand compliance for ensuring document security is embedded into every process in law office workflows.
Our solutions ensure that both local and remote documents are available only to authenticated users with access privileges. Unauthorized users can’t access archived files without express permission from a designated administrator – typically the lawyer handling the case in question.
This approach to document management systems for law firms ensures successful compliance and security long-term. With a managed service vendor like Kelley Create taking care of the setup and maintenance of the security platform, law offices can focus on their core business processes while enjoying state-of-the-art automation and document capture.
Automated High-Volume Document Processing
The key to successful law office automation is the ability to handle large volumes of documents efficiently. Manual processes are too slow and too inaccurate to reasonably account for the number of documents that even small law offices have to contend with.
Workflow automation through a robust, compliant enterprise content platform is key to reducing non-billable hours and generating value in the legal industry. High-volume document processing must be carried out with the same level of comprehensive care that lawyers treat their clients with.
That means that document locations need to be secured and copied to redundant servers for disaster recovery purposes. At the same time, mechanisms for internal investigations and audits need to be included from the start.
Our experts are qualified to develop, deploy, and maintain a law firm document management system that improves workflow efficiency. Reduce your reliance on paper while automating digital processes and simplifying workflows.
Implementing Document Management System for Law Firms
Converting a law firm’s entire history of paper files and implementing a law office records management system may seem difficult. In many cases, the best way to achieve these results is to digitize documents moving forward. From there, only convert older documents at their touchpoint during the regular course of business.
Make Kelley Create your cloud document management consultant. Depend on our history of success deploying high-impact legal office solutions to our customers. You can ensure client data is accessible and secure.