Legal Document Management is Critical for Successful Legal Practice

A law practice can be seen as a combination of paperwork and brain work. Lawyers have to refer to a multiplicity of documents, and create many themselves. Legal document management ensures that they can get just the right document when they need it. Without such quick access to documents, their brainwork cannot be fruitful enough for a successful practice.

Legal Documents

If you go into an old-style law firm, you can almost immediately see a bookshelf with numerous heavily bound volumes. This is the law library consisting of statutes, rules, court decisions and so on. Unless this library is properly managed, the practitioners in the office would find it difficult to prepare their arguments, or provide correct advice to clients.

In the course of their work, lawyers create many kinds of documents, such as briefs, correspondence, contracts and court submissions. Many of these will be in standard formats as prescribed in relevant rules. A template library can help lawyers to prepare many of these documents far more quickly compared to drafting each document from scratch every time.

Legal practice administration involves maintaining time sheets, preparing bills, monitoring accounts receivables (and payables), managing employee payroll, general accounting, cash flow control and so on. These tasks involve dealing with a variety of documents. Without proper management, things can get out of control leading to such eventualities as:

• Billable time is not recorded, and hence not billed
• Even recorded times are not fully billed, or are billed more than once
• Bills are not recovered in time, and remain unpaid for long periods (or for ever)
• Unforeseen cash shortages cause problems and distract practitioners from productive work
• Accounts are in a mess, with the firm unable to find whether they are operating at a profit or loss

No professional is likely to enjoy the above kind of mess.

While good legal document management can help practitioners to be more productive in their core functions, good administrative document management avoids unproductive distractions from work.

These days, all documents are moving to computers. Even where paper documents are needed, maintaining scanned copies of the documents in the computer network minimizes their handling. Day-to-day reference to the documents is then easy. It also becomes possible for several persons to refer to the same document at the same time.

In a typical computerized document management system, all documents are stored in a central server, and can be accessed from any workstation computer connected to the server. Paper documents are scanned and the digital images are stored in the server.

Users work at the workstation computers, and are given controlled access to the documents kept in the server. This means that not everyone can access all documents. Instead, a system of user permissions and passwords determines the kinds of documents that a particular user can access. Thus a payroll clerk can access employee time sheets but not sensitive briefs.

For lawyers in the firm, a computerized legal document management system ensures that they can access all reference materials with just a few mouse clicks, can prepare documents quickly using stored templates, and record the time they spend on each case conveniently into the computer database.

Legal document management can thus help increase productivity in law offices, and lead to higher revenues with the same number of staff.