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Industry: Law
Paul Ryan, Systems Manager
Simpson & Marwick
Falkirk, Scotland
As a litigation firm in Scotland our systems team were recently tasked with putting together a litigation support solution to provide a better service internally and for our clients in handling larger cases. Such systems generally consist of:
- A document discovery solution allowing for large volumes of paper and electronic documents to be scanned and indexed.
- A case analysis tool allowing those responsible for trying the case to detail it in terms most relevant to them.
- A link between the case analysis tool and the document discovery system allowing litigators to links facts to documents.
- A security model that ensures all documents and evidence are stored securely.
- The ability to work offline as required.
Meeting all of these demands seemed beyond the scope of any single system and a particular frustration was the need for us to invest in a separate document discovery system and case analysis tool (CaseMap). Even with these two components in place we are still left with the challenge of finding a method to allow all parties to work securely off-line with their own laptops.
It was unfortunate for us that it was already some 6 months into our project having made very significant investment into alternative disparate systems that we came across MasterFile.
MasterFile is an incredibly well thought out and easy to use product. It has clearly been written by a team who not only understand the technical requirements and limitations of current marketplace solutions but have a deeper understanding of the very specific legal process required.
In truth we were a little concerned by its Lotus Notes platform as like many firms we rely on Exchange but quickly discovered this made very little difference, as we didn't have to change e-mail systems, and the set up and install of Notes on our evaluation system went smoothly. The key advantage of Notes is its excellent capacity to synchronise and handle off-line working without again looking at a separate system to handle this.
MasterFile's inbuilt document discovery database and OCR engine allows for a much cleaner integration between case analysis and document discovery and in turn leads to much more efficient handling of the case. I would urge anyone who has ever had to manage large volumes of paper in a case or who is perhaps tasked with identifying a litigation support solution to look very seriously at MasterFile, I only wish we had seen it 6 months ago!
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