

It’s a bold claim to say that a cloud Document Management System can transform a law firm. The truth is, however, that for most law firms, life is better in the cloud.

In this article, we’ve done our best to explore all law firm Document Management strategies from a neutral, unbiased perspective. A really quality DMS will let you filter or search by matter, document type, author and more. A quality law firm Document Management System will give you Google-like search capability across all of your data. That means: every word on every page of every file. You’ll almost certainly need the ability to search through all of your data–documents, metadata, email and notes–including the content of every document. Suppose you have thousands of documents (or more), and even more emails saved over the course of many years. You Need Robust Searchīasic file systems are also notoriously bad at giving you the ability to search through all of your data. Doing so in a law firm Document Management System makes the document readily identifiable as a motion, and allows you to filter, sort or search for all documents of that type.Ī good law firm Document Management System will allow you to apply document types, status (EG: Draft, Final, or Filed) as well as internal notes visible only to your team.

#ON PREMISE FILE SHARING SOFTWARE PDF#
For instance, you may want to classify a particular word document or PDF file as a motion. Metadata is simply a way you can apply attributes to a document that are about the document. You Need to Classify and Annotate Documentsīasic file systems like file servers and simple cloud storage don’t provide much in the way of metadata. A good, law-firm-centric document management application will enforce a clear Client/Matter-centric hierarchy for documents and email, keeping your data organized with 10 matters or a 10,000 matters. Inevitably, over time, not everyone in your firm follows the protocol for creating and naming folders, and organizing documents… and over time, your file system becomes a mess, and finding the client matter or document you’re looking for becomes a mess. Perhaps you create a folder per client, or per matter, or both. Most basic file-and-folder systems start out well-organized enough. Your Filesystem is a Wild West of Unstructured Folders
