How the legal industry can benefit from embracing the revolutionary digital technologies that will help improve performance, efficiency and accuracy.
Improving business efficiency is a top priority for most businesses, especially for those where paperwork is constantly piling high. Richard Fishburn, Professional Services Director of Ben Johnson’s Technology division explains how legal businesses can achieve this.
The legal sector continues to face many challenges, one of which is managing and keeping on top of process heavy documentation. Traditional methods simply can’t deal with the volume of data requiring management and organisation. This is where digitalisation comes in.
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Efficient digital solutions allow legal firms to boost productivity by automating document and information workflows, saving time, space and money.
Here’s how:
- Mail Room Automation
Implementing mail room automation transforms the management and processing of legal documents by lowering the time spent manually classifying and distributing mail.
Digitalisation automatically sorts and routes all in-bound communications regardless of whether it’s paper, fax or e-mail. Incoming mail can be scanned, automatically saved and indexed using information from the document, such as the ‘case number’, ‘client name’ or ‘address’. Indexing software has made huge jumps forward using natural language processing to get to the core understanding of unstructured text. Software can now determine whether a letter is for distribution to Family Law, Personal Injury or Residential Property by the words it contains and the structure of its sentences.
Workflows can also be set up for mail, and with the required documents can then be electronically sent to the correct recipients, delivering the right information to the right person at the right time. This helps speed up the process of responding to incoming queries, reducing waiting times for clients leading to improved customer service and satisfaction.
- Document Management
The legal sector is renowned for its large paper archives, which must be kept safe, secure and intelligently organised. Legal firms will especially benefit from smart document storage and management as it improves their document handling and allows for remote access and tracking.
Digital storage on premise or in the cloud is an intelligent way to keep legal archives organised, easily accessible and secure. Additionally, you can add access controls and audit trails helping to comply with regulations and legal admissibility. This includes clear electronic audit trail of who has viewed and amended documents, making document management far more accurate and accountable.
This way of storage is far more efficient and has fast searching capabilities – there is no need to spend hours searching through filing cabinets to retrieve documents, giving staff more time to focus on important tasks.
- Document Distribution for Outbound Communications
Postage costs are at an all-time high and clients are demanding access to document at a much quicker rate. Delivery of high quality electronic documents through email or online portals helps reduce the cost of outbound communications but improve the client’s experience at the same time.
Intelligent printer drivers can monitor print traffic, make decisions on how best to send outbound communications, apply branding, amend attachments and transition away from print to digital means all through the user simply choosing to ‘print’ a document in the normal way.
Where documents absolutely must be sent by post the mailroom can be automated with addresses cleaned and mail sorted for maximum discounts.