It is likely that your current document management system isn’t efficient enough for your management needs. You will often find yourself losing important company documents or spending a lot of time searching for files.
And while you might not realize it, it can affect your productivity.
In fact, Coveo found out that 88% of employees feel demoralized when they can’t locate the information they need to complete their work.
Legal firms are one of the most document-intensive businesses, placing an enormous need for them to incorporate the right legal technology to manage their documents.
So integrating document management software into your law firm can give you a competitive edge by increasing efficiency, limiting risks, and maintaining good customer service.
In a business where money and time are important, a document management system will save you both.
In this article, We’ll discuss key document management software benefits.
Let’s get started.
Organizing Documents
Is your office filled with file cabinets and bins?
With a large volume of documents and an effective storage system, your room may end up stacked with files all over, which may appear a little out of place. And maybe you are thinking you could just create space for file cabinets and bins.
Well according to research, that will only worsen your problem since physical document storage takes up about 15% of the total office space.
Hard drives and folder-based filing systems can also be expensive. To add to that, they do not completely solve your problems as you have to manually search to find a particular document.
Who wants that?
What you need is a system that can effectively organize all your documents and save you space—document management software.
They provide a respiratory for accessing, storing, and managing all your files—documents, emails, and electronic media, to mention a few. And not just that, with automation applications, you can save time on tasks such as organizing documents manually.
Just to grasp an idea of some of the benefits of document management software, think of folders, standardized naming practices, and searchability. All these features will help you create a system that works for you and not against you, consequently saving you time and money.
A case study by Docsvault reveals that C & F Automotive had a challenge with document organization which made it difficult for them to find their documents.
However, after implementing document management software, they were able to properly organize their documents and make them quickly accessible.
Enhanced Security
Legal firms hold crucial client and company data.
Therefore, ensuring that all documents are protected and secure is of supreme importance.
You would therefore be shooting yourself in the foot by not investing in document management software as sensitive employee and client bio data is left lying around for anyone to access.
Data breaches due to ineffective management are actually more common than you might have thought. To give you perspective, an IBM report found out that the average cost for data breaches in 2020 was an average of $3.86 million which increased to $4.45 million in 2023.
But you don’t have to be part of the statistics.
Guaranteeing multiple levels of security in order to control whoever accesses, reads, and modifies your company documents, is just one of the numerous benefits of document management software.
This is not to mention that document management software provides an audit trail allowing you to monitor your documents’ lifecycles. An audit trail provides information about everything your document has gone through such as modifications, download information, and sharing information.
With such security measures, your clients are going to entrust you with their information. Additionally, they will ensure that your documents are protected from unauthorized access.
Previously, Firsport was facing a challenge ensuring the security of paper records in their various locations. The company needed a secure document management system that guaranteed the security of their documents from breaches and accidents.
After partnering with Document Logistix, Firstport was able to streamline its processes and secure its documents.
Quick Search and Retrieval
Have you ever lost a document?
There’s probably nothing more annoying than knowing that a document exists, yet you cannot locate it.
Depending on an inefficient solution to document management, makes organization hard, which in turn makes the process of searching and retrieving documents sluggish.
When running a law firm, billable time is very important, so wasting time on unproductive tasks like searching for documents loses you money. So legal case management software with proper document management features is your savior.
In fact, according to a report by Clio, the average lawyer bills about 2.5 hours of an 8-hour day.
So what are the rest of the hours spent on?
Unproductive administrative work, such as finding documents.
In regards to this, the benefits of document management software include the ability to eliminate such tasks by allowing you to organize and find your documents fast with only a few pieces of data, eliminating the need for mastering complex folder systems.
In addition to that, document management systems are able to do this by providing abilities to filter searches through features such as optical character recognition, metadata indexing, and scanned document profiling.
The time you save on document searches can be transformed into billable hours so you can use it to assist clients and expand your legal practice.
Self Assured realized they had a challenge managing vast amounts of documents and that their paper-based system made it hard for their employees to retrieve documents and share them with clients.
In response to this problem, the company involved a Document Manager which enabled their staff to access information from anywhere, both from the company and from remote locations.
Enhancing Collaborations
Collaboration plays an important role in innovation and productivity.
Therefore, your employees should be able to seamlessly collaborate to promote teamwork without being limited by location and time. Similarly, they should be able to communicate and work together with clients on their cases.
Sharing documents efficiently is core in your collaborative efforts, and as far as that goes, emails work just fine.
But how secure are your emails?
Turns out by default—not at all. Emails are exposed to high-security threats such as hacking, and you could easily send a document to the wrong email.
In 2021, 1 out of 4 companies experienced an email-related security breach according to a survey conducted by Hornetsecurity.
Document management software provides a secure alternative for collaborating and sharing sensitive documents. Users will require authentication to access and read documents shared via the software.
This gives you full control over document sharing and creates trust with your clients.
And what’s better is that you don’t have to keep sending documents back and forth. What this does is just create multiple versions of documents floating around. A good document management software will maintain your documents in a shared environment allowing all authorized parties to work on it from there.
Earlier, before Holley & Menker, a company that deals with intellectual property law, involved LexWorkplace in its document management, its employees had a challenge collaborating.
LexWorkplace was able to provide a secure document management software that allowed the company’s employees to work collaboratively from anywhere, within the company, and remotely.
Version Control
Legal practices often result in the creation of multiple documents.
With teams collaborating on shared files more, there is a need for streamlined document management software that enables them to collaborate while maintaining full control over document versions to ensure consistency, accuracy, and compliance.
Lack of effective version control could lead to errors and inconsistency due to team members working on outdated versions of a document.
It is also worth mentioning that manually keeping track of document versions and sharing the current one can be a chore and time-consuming.
In fact, according to a study by Perforce, 83% of knowledge workers lose time to document versioning issues each day.
What are some of the benefits of document management software
Investing in one can assist your team save time by enabling easy tracking of multiple versions of documents, eliminating confusion, and making it easy to collaborate.
Besides that, version control tools can significantly increase accuracy and efficiency. For instance, in case of a disaster, it is possible to restore essential documents that may be lost. Additionally, you can maintain a high level of competency by monitoring changes to a document over time.
It makes it easy to identify and fix errors or mistakes.
Canal Barge Company realized that their crew was having a hard time with tasks such as sharing navigation reports. They tried using Dropbox but that created another problem where members would often overwrite each other’s files.
Egnyte helped the company maintain version history automatically which ensured compliance and that only the modified parts of files were synced to save time.
Conclusion
Document management software is essential to law firms.
They are essential in ensuring that you save time on storing, retrieving, and collaborating on documents. Most importantly, it maximizes profits by increasing your billable hours.
According to a report by Fortune Business Insight, the global document management system market size is projected to hit $18.97 billion by 2030.
This statistic shows how companies are embracing document management systems to transform how they manage their documents.
Some of the document management software benefits include enhanced security, document version control, and document organization, to mention a few.
Do you see how this can transform your law firm?
If you are having a hard time meeting deadlines, remotely accessing work documents, and finding necessary documents, I recommend implementing DMS into your firm for enhanced productivity and streamlined document management.