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A well known PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP study found professionals spend 50% of their time looking for information. Can you afford to have the professional staff of your organization waste half of their time just looking for information? Probably not, and therefore storing documents as paper is an expensive proposition.
Conventional wisdom, and technology, suggests you install and manage two systems just to manage your documents: a document management system for work product and a litigation support system for evidentiary documents. But even if you install two systems, what are you going to do with the paper documents?
You know, the ones that drown your office every day. They seem to come from everywhere: your client, the opposing side's counsel, co-counsel, external organizations and expert witnesses, etc. The list is endless.
And what about signed or stamped and filed copies of your own documents?
Remember this scenario we've given before:
You've reviewed one of your client's documents stored in your litigation support system and had some questions, so you wrote to your client but your letter is stored in the document management system.
When your client replied, they answered your questions so this was new evidence for the litigation support system.
However, they also asked you to update the status of the case, advised you of changes in strategy they felt were needed, and also raised some other administrative issues.
So what are you going to do with this letter? Put it in both systems? What about security considerations -- leading litigation support systems don't allow you to keep individual document private. What about other paper documents: which go where and how will you remember?
Don't forget that leading document management and litigation support systems have not been integrated to work together.
Document management (DM) system vendors tell you to just scan the documents and store them in the DM system, along with all your other work-product. However the documents are not OCRed so they can't be indexed and content searched. And even if they were, many leading DM systems are not designed to let you take thousands of documents on the road with you -- they don't even offer full text searching of content when you're disconnected from the network!
Litigation support systems, on the other hand, are designed to manage scanned images and OCR them. But then your case file is split -- outgoing work product and work in progress documents in the document management system and incoming documents in the litigation support system.
Clearly, as we've pointed out in our article, "Managing litigation and work-product (work in progress) documents: Are two systems really needed just to manage your documents?", something is wrong. Having two systems just to deal with documents simply does not make any sense.
MasterFile's single-file-per-case repository eliminates all these problems because MasterFile not only eliminates the unnecessary cost and headache of using two document systems (see below), MasterFile also provides you with the tools you need to efficiently process paper documents, evidentiary documents and work product:
- MasterFile's Watch Folder Monitor makes short work of dealing with incoming mail each morning.
- Use MasterFile's Express Load in semi-automated, Power Assist mode to bulk load small document batches.
- Use Express Load in fully automated batch or CSV mode to bulk load large document batches.
- Use MasterFile's Evidence Cruncher to OCR image documents for content searching -- before or after you load them in MasterFile.
- Or, use the Evidence Cruncher for bulk conversion of scanned documents to industry standard PDF format rather than proprietary image formats of litigation support systems.
- Use MasterFile's exclusive Extract Repository to cull what's important from any document -- either that you've drafted or that you've received -- so critical information can be seen at a glance and save you hours of rereading, hunting and searching.
MasterFile -- We focus on the technology so you can focus on your cases.
Further information
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