3 Ways Law Firms Win with Capture Automation Software
Arguably one of the most document-intensive industries, 74% of legal businesses still rely on a manual process to gather the information, evidence, and documents required for discovery. Managing hundreds of client letters, legal service agreements, and government filings monthly, law firms are among the best candidates for capture automation software. Although cautious to take processes digital – in fear of losing control over documentation and the data within – electronic capture solutions provide law firms with the ability to eliminate paper-based filing, while gaining immediate, firm-wide access to case files, facilitating the capture, search, and retrieval of critical client information.
Capture automation allows legal documents such as pleadings, depositions, appeals, transcripts, and even billing records to be managed with greater efficiency, accuracy, and security. With advanced data extraction and automated workflow routing, optimal productivity is achieved by taking high volumes of documents to automatically store, validate, and distribute data with minimal manual intervention. Let’s take a more indepth look at how capture automation can give you a winning edge:
- Capture: Standard legal documents such as contracts, court filings, client briefs, and discovery forms can be time consuming and hard to manage – especially when customizing for each individual client. But with capture automation software, a simple batch scan through a scanner or multifunction printer instantly transforms each document’s data into actionable information. With features like Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Forms Learning, you can be sure the conditional logic of each document type is accommodated as the scanning software adjusts to individual document templates on the fly. Each document format is intelligently recognized, as data is automatically extracted and exported into a case management system, Excel spreadsheet or document management software. In the case of an unrecognized document format, advanced capture automation sends the file back to the validation stage where a user is notified of the pending action. This increases your ability to format and distribute documents, saving hours of your valuable time, allowing you to better serve your clients and colleagues.
- Process: Whether it’s local transport or overnight mailing, trying to get documents and records to clients, co-counsel, opposing counsel and courts can be very time-consuming and costly. But, what if there were a way to completely eliminate mailroom costs while also getting your documents where they needed to be on time? By automating your mailroom processes, managing and delivering legal documents can be digitized through capture workflows. With automatic email notifications of document arrival, pending approvals, and even signatures, documents will get into the hands of the legal team faster, ensuring that deadlines and court dates are met. Legal documents can also be easily retrieved by the firm’s attorneys and other authorized members of the staff, through simple keyword searches for client name, docket number, and more, allowing quick access to documents that may not have been anticipated in court.
- Protect: In the discovery phase of a lawsuit, any information related to the case is fair game. But often times, as things progress, lawyers will try to gain access to information they shouldn’t. This makes it essential that sensitive information, such as a client’s financial or personal medical records, are kept secure. By integrating capture automation software with a document management system, information is protected against unauthorized access with user-based security permissions. This in return, provides a smart and reliable solution that will keep your documents and their data compliant with PDF/A regulations. With audit trail logs, access to all document versions, annotations, notes, and edits, legal teams are provided with full visibility into document actions. This keeps you and your law firm compliant, with the added benefit of accelerating the recovery and continuity of your business information in the event of a natural disaster or security breach.
In an industry where text, words, data and accuracy are everything, it’s important to make sure, as a lawyer, paralegal, secretary or litigator, everything is as detailed as possible. With a capture automation solution in place, not only will you be able to streamline legal documents and their information, but processes will be completed faster, getting your documents where they need to be on time. With better management and greater efficiency, your law firm can solve paper-based challenges both in and outside of the courtroom. If you’re ready to get started with capture automation, contact Square 9 Softworks today!
