Selecting The Right Document Management Tools

Attorneys’ time is a precious commodity. It’s a waste of time to search for documents or recreate transactional documents from scratch.

How do you maximize the time attorneys spend on matters that need their expertise and minimize the time spent on administrative or repetitive tasks?

Document management software, simply, helps law firms organize their documents. But, it’s more complex than that. Not only does a document management system store your information, but it provides a way for you to search and index your files and share data with other authorized users. Better document management systems can manage versions of documents, integrate with your email system, and allow remote access. Many are intuitive to use so they require little training.

Document generation software does just what its name implies: It automates document generation, which keeps attorneys from having to reinvent the wheel every time they create a contract or other transactional document.

Because law firms have particular security needs, many document management and document generation applications are built specifically for the legal profession. These big five brands of document management and document generation software have different features and strengths.

Document Management Software

1. iManage
iManage is better for large law firms because it can be hosted in the cloud or on-site and requires maintenance by trained IT professionals. iManage has the advantage of being well integrated with Microsoft Office. That provides ease of use and further streamlines time spent on filing emails or documents into the system.

2. Worldox
Worldox also integrates with Microsoft Office, and it is an appropriate choice for law firms of all sizes. It has a central document control system, which means that information from multiple databases can be combined for greater time-savings.

3. MetaJure
MetaJure also can be used by any size law firm. One of its advantages is the automatic integration of all documents (including image-based documents, such as PDFs).

Document Generation Software

4. HotDocs
Users who want to create a transactional legal document, such as a will or contract, interact with a HotDocs template to input information specific to a case or matter, which increases accuracy.

5. ProDoc
ProDoc generates transactional legal documents by asking questions specific to each situation. It also allows users to further customize documents if necessary.

Questions to ask

Selecting the right document management and document generation software for your firm is of the utmost importance.

Here are just a few questions to ask to make sure you get the best software for your needs:

• Is the application hosted on-premise or in the cloud? Does the cloud provider have experience assisting law firms with your legal and business applications?

• Do you need on-site or on-call IT people to manage the system? Can it be easily installed or must it be completely customized?

• Was the software built specifically for use by those in the legal profession? Does it include standards of security that will keep your law firm from breaking privilege?

• How would you prefer that the document management application structure its organization? By project? By matter? By work group? In some other way?

• How intuitive is the software? Does it require extensive training, or is it simple for users to get on board?

• Does the application allow for offline access? For access across multiple devices?

• Does the software use multiple databases or is the data housed centrally?

If you need assistance determining which type of software has the features you need, or if you would like help integrating new applications with your existing system, Legal Workspace’s application support specialists can help. You can take advantage of Legal Workspace’s Software as a Service licensing model for certain document management or document generation applications. Legal Workspace can also move existing licenses for software to its cloud environment.

Document management and document generation software can act as time-savers—but law firms must put in time up-front to select the program that will work best for their specific needs.

Legal Software 101

legal-software-101Whether you’re getting ready to hang your own shingle or managing an established law firm, implementing a suite of legal software can seem like a daunting task. You might have been intimidated by the cost, the time to put the new procedures and tools in place and possibly the change from familiar processes. However, even with those hurdles, it pays (literally – it saves money) to improve your practice by adopting technologies that work best for you and your firm.

Software Categories

The four categories of applications commonly used by law firms include:

  • Practice Management Software
  • Document Management Software
  • Time and Billing Software
  • Legal Document Generation Automation Software

Practice Management

Practice management applications allow attorneys to streamline their workflow and business processes, thereby enabling them to spend more time generating revenue and less time doing tedious, unproductive tasks. These applications, at their core, offer fundamental matter-centric organization of contacts, calendaring, and management.

The use of practice management applications helps attorneys and staff with organization and quick reference to vital information, no matter the practice. These tools often integrate with other applications that allow for easier manipulation of that data as well as increased mobility.

Common practice management applications include:

  1. Amicus Attorney®
  2. Needles®
  3. Practice Master®
  4. Thomson Reuters ProLaw®

Document Management

Document management software applications are powerful tools in any law firm’s workflow. These applications provide the firm with a centralized and searchable depository of documents, emails and other matter-related items. Law firms deal with volumes of data in a variety of forms and formats. With the billable hour in mind, the ability to quickly search and recall documents or emails is essential for optimizing the firm’s workflow.

With paper documents converted to electronic files, less physical storage space is needed. It becomes easier to take or access documents off-site and audit trails become easier to maintain.

Two popular document management solutions are:

  1. Worldox®
  2. Microsoft SharePoint®

Time and Billing

Two of the most common struggles with any law firm, regardless of the size, is capturing billable time and getting bills out in a timely fashion. The right time and billing application can assist a timekeeper with these tasks and can even help capture more of their billable time. Used correctly, time and billing applications easily pay for themselves with more hours billed and more efficient billing practices.

Your accounting software can also be linked to your time and billing solution in order to facilitate invoicing and tracking accounts receivable and trust account transactions.

Popular time and billing software for law firms includes:

  1. Timeslips®
  2. Tabs3®Billing Software
  3. QuickBooks®

Legal Document Generation Automation

With law firms often collecting data for cases from a variety of disparate sources, assembling a single document from that data can be a challenge. Document generation software allows firms to streamline and automate that process.

These applications use templates and interview questions to help assemble the documents for attorneys. Firms can quickly automate the generation of releases, letters, government forms and other frequently needed documents.

Some applications that help law firms quickly generate these documents are:

  1. Hot Docs®
  2. ProDoc®
  3. Amicus Attorney®

Benefits of Integrated Legal Software Applications

Correctly implemented, these integrated technology solutions can save you time and money in billings, document generation and effectiveness – all while reducing risk.

  1. Increase profitability – capture billable time
  2. Increase productivity – automate documents
  3. Increase effectiveness – build templates
  4. Reduce risk – identify malpractice and disciplinary milestones

These benefits are reached not only through the efficiency of using each individual application, but also through reduced redundancy as the various products share information with each other.

The Legal Workspace Solution

Legal Workspace provides a cloud-based legal work environment with licensing options for all the software applications mentioned in this article. The platform was created just for lawyers and law firms. Our base package includes the complete Microsoft®Office suite, as well as the latest anti-virus and anti-spam protection and nightly backups of your data.

You can also customize your environment to add any specific legal applications your firm already uses or wants to offer, including the unique e-filing software used to submit documents to your local court. We allow you to move existing licenses to the cloud or take advantage of our SaaS (Software as a Service) licensing model for many legal software applications.

Our solution can be implemented in less than a week, often with most of the process happening over the course of a weekend, meaning little disruption to your workflow.

No matter how new or well-established your firm is, you can discover time savings and return on investment by implementing the right legal software solution.