Document Management for Legal Industry

The Law Offices of Polsky, Shouldice & Rosen, P.C. concentrate in the area of workers’ compensation, social security disability and personal injury. With over 135 years of combined experience in the practice of New York Workers’ Compensation Law, the firm’s six partner attorneys, three associates and bilingual staff are devoted to helping injured workers who have suffered from on the job accidents, injuries and illnesses.

Based in Rockville Centre, New York, and with additional offices in Brooklyn and the Bronx, the firm is conveniently and centrally located to represent clients in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan, as well as Nassau and Suffolk Counties, and provides a high level of personal care and service. “Our attorneys’ extensive experience and dedication, combined with the exceptional high quality of our staff, set us apart from other law firms,” said Robyn Geringer, the firm’s Office Manager.

Law has always been a document-centric discipline, with legal documents arguably among the most voluminous and ubiquitous of any of the professional fields. As a successful, high volume law office advocating for injured clients for more than 20 years, the Law Offices of Polsky, Shouldice & Rosen had steadily accumulated enough legal documents to fill dozens of large filing cabinets.

“While we have always been meticulous about managing our legal records, the sheer volume of paper eventually began overwhelming us,” Geringer recalled. “We had to manage thousands of paper legal documents, files and folders. Doing this by hand required a great deal of time and was very inefficient. In addition, the filing cabinets took up a lot of expensive office space and in the event of a natural or man-made disaster the documents could be damaged or lost.”

Adopting GlobalSearch solved these vexing challenges and provided the firm with many other benefits as well. “GlobalSearch did a really wonderful job of streamlining the process of filing and retrieving legal documents,” Geringer said. “While this contributes to the bottom line performance of the firm, it also helps us provide better customer service because all of the documents are literally at our fingertips when our clients call us. In addition, GlobalSearch allows our attorneys to access legal documents remotely using their laptop computers while in the courtroom and other locations.”

Today, GlobalSearch is the law firm’s digital repository for all documents pertaining to its clients’ cases, including a wide variety of documents originating with the clients themselves, the courts, the insurance companies and other sources. The immense quantity of individual documents generated, as well as the extreme length of many document types, makes Enterprise Content Management a cost-effective and practical solution for the legal profession.

When legal documents arrive in the firm’s office they are quickly scanned into GlobalSearch using barcode technology. Each new document is assigned a file number corresponding to the client and is indexed into GlobalSearch using that file number. The documents are also identified by type. When necessary, documents can also be indexed into GlobalSearch using a variety of other criteria.

Once safely and securely indexed into GlobalSearch, these legal documents can be quickly and easily retrieved when needed by the firm’s attorneys and other authorized members of the staff, either from their office work stations or from a remote location such as a courthouse. At the high hourly rates commanded by attorneys, every hour saved by having remote access to documents is especially valuable.

The results of implementing an Enterprise Content Management solution have been quite dramatic. “GlobalSearch has helped us to operate much more efficiently,” Geringer said. “As a busy law practice, we have not reduced our overall labor hours, but the way in which our attorneys and staff are using their time has changed. We now spend much less time filing and retrieving documents and much more time doing other more productive tasks. Our document handling processes are at least 50 percent more efficient and we are not even using GlobalSearch’s full capabilities yet.”

Since installing GlobalSearch, Geringer reports that the firm has been able to eliminate more than 55 four-drawer, legal-size filing cabinets. “We moved from a huge office to a smaller building, in large part because we no longer needed space for storing paper files,” Geringer explained. The approximately 2,000 square feet of commercial office space saved by the firm when it moved into a smaller building can be valued conservatively at $50,000 annually in the New York metropolitan area market.

“I would absolutely not hesitate to recommend GlobalSearch to other firms,” Geringer concluded. “This impressive solution has allowed us to operate much more efficiently, saving us time and money while we provide improved service for our clients. GlobalSearch is customer friendly, so people with even modest computer skills need only a minimum of training to learn and use it. Square 9’s customer support team is highly responsive and makes sure you are completely satisfied. I would say that our firm’s experience with GlobalSearch and Square 9 has been extremely positive and productive.”