Barriers to improvement

Introducing a Unified Solution for Legal Document Management

You need the right tools to minimise the document admin you’re not aware you’re doing. Then you can get on with your actual work, your deep work, (not the preparation). Part Four

Throughout this series, we've discussed the nature of legal work, analysed the pros and cons of traditional paper bundling, and brought attention to the inadequacies of current legal document workflow management. Now, it’s time to shed light on a solution that seeks to remedy the complexities and inefficiencies inherent in legal documentation processes.

At the heart of the problem is the fact that legal workflow management tools are designed with a skewed focus, often prioritizing document production over usage. This results in a tool that is ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst, failing to simplify the processes it is supposed to support. Lawyers need a tool that enables them to manage, read, annotate, and engage with documents, rather than simply produce them.

Experts like Harvard Business Review and Forbes have stressed the importance of developing digital workflows that effectively streamline processes and encourage productivity. In the legal realm, this means developing a tool that isn't just about creating documents, but about enhancing a lawyer's interaction with them.

Moreover, current practices also involve bundling as a separate process – an unnecessary and time-consuming step that should be integrated into the workflow. After all, it's not just about producing the bundle; it's about working with it from the moment the first document enters the workflow to the moment the bundle is printed out.

The legal world has long cried out for a solution that encapsulates the entire document lifecycle, from creation to printing, with everything in between. A tool that streamlines and simplifies, without compromising on functionality or accessibility.

The solution to these issues is not far-fetched. Imagine a world where legal professionals can easily navigate and annotate their documents, manage their workflows more effectively, and have a seamless bundling process all within a single tool. It’s no longer a vision for the future, but a present reality.

Several thought leaders like Above the Law have recognized the need for legal technology that embraces this holistic approach, arguing that the future of legal work lies in digital tools that unify these processes.

Unveiling the Solution: Casedo

Enter Casedo. Casedo is a tool that is designed with the lawyer's workflow in mind. It is built to address the unique challenges of document management in the legal world, allowing users to read, annotate, and manage their documents all in one place.

Casedo does away with the concept of bundling as a separate process, integrating it as a part of the overall workflow. As such, you can work with your documents and bundles from the moment you receive the first document until the time comes to print the final product. This represents a revolutionary shift in the way we think about and interact with legal documents, eliminating unnecessary steps and making legal work more efficient and manageable.

Moreover, Casedo is designed specifically for reading and annotating documents. It is not just a tool for producing documents, but a tool for truly interacting with them, offering functionalities that empower lawyers to work with their documents in a more intuitive and effective manner.

In essence, Casedo is a unified solution that allows legal professionals to focus on what truly matters: delivering top-notch legal services. By simplifying the process of managing, reading, and annotating documents, and seamlessly integrating bundling into the workflow, Casedo facilitates the transition to a more efficient and effective legal practice.

Conclusion

It's clear that a shift in the way we manage legal documents is needed. The legal profession requires a tool that empowers them to effectively use and manage their documents, rather than just create them. Moreover, the process of bundling should be seamlessly integrated into the workflow, rather than treated as a separate task.

That solution is Casedo. Designed specifically for reading and annotating documents, Casedo does away with bundling as a separate process, wrapping all these necessities within a single tool. It's a streamlined solution from the moment the first document enters the workflow to when the bundle is printed out.

by Jim Hitch

Current legal document workflow management isn’t working

You need the right tools to minimise the document admin you’re not aware you’re doing. Then you can get on with your actual work, your deep work, (not the preparation). Part Three

In this series I’ve been trying to break down legal document workflows. I want to show how legal professionals could minimise their document admin time by choosing the right tools. By doing so, they can improve their workflow management, cut occupational stress and improve productivity.

In the first article in the series, I attempted to get to the heart of the actual work that legal professionals do, rather than the top line answer of “I’m a lawyer”, because only in knowing that could you successfully choose the tools you need.

In the second part of the series it may have looked as if I’d headed off at a tangent by concentrating on paper bundles. However, my premise was that we have a tendency to assume legacy ways of working are no longer fit for purpose. That we have nothing to learn from them. I wanted to show that the paper bundle has for a long time (centuries?) been an excellent tool for a variety of reasons. It continues to be particularly good for focused work, even with the admitted downsides of physical production, replication and archive. My argument being that ‘digital’ bundles, such as they are, tend to have solved the downsides of paper bundles without managing to adequately bring on board the upsides of paper bundles in terms of efficiency and productivity.   At the end of the last article, I touched on how you might now be interacting with your papers. In this third part of the series I elaborate on this theme.

Why your current document workflow isn’t working

We can’t improve our productivity if we’re not aware that the way we work is inefficient. The extra steps you take to get your work done are not just administrative but are a workflow management and time management issue. Let’s take the paper bundle as the base case for document working, and step to digital from there.

Paper bundles: the good, the bad and the ugly

In the last part of this series, we touched on the good side of working with paper bundles

• the ability to focus, to work through documents by utilising non-linear reading (jumping tab to tab)
• to pick up where you left off
• to have a ready archive at the end of the process.

The downsides are obvious and common to many legacy physical tools and workflows, be they collaboration tools (of which paper bundles are one), or not. Paper bundles are

• time consuming to create
• time consuming to append
• extremely time consuming to replicate
• high risk in terms of loss / damage

The above negative aspects of bundles above have ‘digitise my workflow’ written all over them. And these processes have, by and large, beet successfully digitised.

What’s wrong with current legal document workflow management

1. Case & document workflow management systems are great for managing documents not using them

Document management is hugely important to any business, particularly in law where client data is the bread and butter of the business. But in terms of understanding and digesting the information at hand, ‘document management’ is unhelpful. Legal professionals shouldn’t be ‘managing’ documents, that is for support staff etc. to deal with. Legal professionals need to be using documents as part of their work.   The current issue is that ‘document management’, by which I mean identification, storage, risk management etc, has dominated over the ability to use documents. For the sake of identification and good record management, documents are stored securely and individually. The focus is to not lose documents, in other words to manage documents, and to be able to identify them easily so they can be found and retrieved quickly and then used. This is great for a database of records (whatever those records are). However, it is very poor workflow when it comes to using those documents. You get a better sense of how inefficient this is for using the documents for work by looking at the hard copy analogy. If we imagine that in a paper-bundle, instead of putting all the relevant documents into a single paper bundle, you bundled each document individually. Not only that, but also bound them, titled them and tagged them individually. Follow that you kept them on a shelf so that any time you wanted to look at the document you had to get up from your desk to go and fetch it. If you needed to digest 58 documents relating to a case, you’d have to get 58 different documents off the shelf (and put them back at the end of the day). This cumbersome workflow doesn’t even look at the question of how you would signpost between documents?

2. PDF Readers and Editors are great for producing documents, not reading them

For PDFs we look to PDF Readers and Editors. If you are faced with emails, PDFs and Word documents then you need to Alt + Tab (switch) back and forth between them, and even if you had all your documents in PDF format, how are you going to open those 58 documents (in the example above)? In 58 tabs across the top of your screen? How are you going to link between them, let alone read them. Non-linear reading becomes an exercise in will power with workflow like this! What if you are technically proficient enough to create a single bookmarked PDF of all the documents you need? That’s great, a bit like producing a professionally bound hard copy document. But what happens if, as is bound to happen, you need to add a document at the last minute, recreating that magnificent monolithic document is a long and tedious process.   None of this is an issue with a paper bundle, except maybe the cumbersome addition of new documents.

3. Creating a bundle is a separate process

And then given how you work with documents, how do you create an electronic (or even paper) bundle if you need to go to arbitration or to court? You need to create a ‘bundle’ from scratch. Back in the paper days you would already have a bundle to hand, you had begun to make it from day one of the case. It built up over time, and then, when it needed to be shared with the other side or the court, you had to make a clean copy, but at the very least you had a copy to clone. But now, none of this. Not only does one spend a huge amount of time opening up individual files, and having to search across them individually. Making links between them is tiresome, and making a bundle another chore in itself. It’s as if all the benefits of the paper bundle have been taken away just to save time and money in the creation of a paper bundle. One set of inefficiencies have been replaced with another.

The Solution

This is the current situation, and many are yet to notice that this is even a problem. It so ingrained is it into our workflows and workflow management systems. However, it doesn’t need to be, as I will show in the final part of this series.

by Jim Hitch

Is working with paper bundles all bad?

You need the right tools to minimise the document admin you’re not aware you’re doing. Then you can get on with your actual work, your deep work, (not the preparation). Part Two

In the first part of this series I looked at making sure you knew the kind of work you did, so that you could make sure that you chose the proper tools for the job, rather than just using what other’s did, just defaulting to something, as people do, for example, with using email as their primary workflow whether it be for their legal deep work or not.

Throughout this article I’m going to use the term bundle (in capitals) to refer to the legal stack of papers that lawyers work with on a particular matter or case. Traditionally this would have been a paper bundle. Bundle is a UK term, in North America the term used is ‘Brief’. And of course you can exchange Lawyer for the word Attorney.

In the first article I alluded to the idea that, though we’ve been trying to replace them seemingly forever, paper bundles are not so bad after all. This is what I want to look in this piece.

Is working with paper bundles all bad?

Traditionally you’d do your brain work by printing all the relevant documents and putting them in a paper bundle. Then you'd tab it up with a table of contents to create an effective way to navigate the documents. On creating the bundle you then added documents to the bundle as they arrived, working through the bundle making annotations and comments as necessary. During periods when the case wasn’t moving forward you’d file it somewhere, but crucially, because of the way you put the bundle together, you could easily pick up where you left off, whenever you needed to. You could add documents at will as you went along (though unbinding some of these files could be tedious). Once the case was closed or otherwise dealt with, you had a ready-made archive which could be stored appropriately.

It seems, in some ways, to be a rather quaint way of working, nostalgic, almost, and many would decry its inefficiencies, but I would ask two questions:

1. How did you actually interact with the documents when they were in paper form?

There are many ways you’d have worked through the bundle, depending on how you chose to work. However, I can guarantee (almost) that you didn’t start at page one and work through the bundle in a linear fashion (this would have been particularly true once you were up and running with the bundle, once you were adding pages after the initial ‘building’). No, you made links and connections between different parts of the bundle. Letters and other documents were added at different periods during the course of the case. In other words, you read the bundle in a non-linear way. You followed the trail of the sense of the matter, not the page numbers.

2. How do you interact with your papers now?

If you are still stubbornly printing your papers to make a paper bundle as above, then good for you. However, this is a poor choice in terms of time and cost (and I guess you are getting it in the neck on costs, time and the sheer urgh of whoever is putting the bundle together for you, if someone is).

If, as is more likely, you’ve got a digital filing or case management system, your way of interacting with the documents couldn’t be further from the workflow you did with paper, not that many years ago. And this is where the problem lies, and the inefficiencies creep in.

Digital things are meant to be improvements on analogue. We know this to be the idea, but we also know that the reality can be very different. And different in this case, it very much is.

Paper bundles are cumbersome, heavy, massively time-consuming to produce, and not-backed up (not to mention environmentally suspect). Digital solves all of these issues.

However, as previously stated, paper bundles are flexible, easy to understand, excellent for focus, marking up and ultimately archiving. Apart from perhaps the latter, digital to date has not managed to match any of these things. Digital solutions have solved the admin problems of paper bundles, but by doing so have also removed all the benefits that bundles have.

So what is it about these supposedly great digital workflows that is causing such trouble? In the third part of this article, I take a look.

by Jim Hitch

What kind of work do you do?

You need the right tools to minimise the document admin you’re not aware you’re doing, and get on with your actual work, your deep legal work (not the preparation). Part One

In this series I’m going to look at why you need the right tools for the legal work you do and why these tools are just as important as being an efficient and effective legal practitioner. In fact, the wrong tools are a barrier to effectiveness. I’ll show how, for all its flaws, the traditional paper bundle remains a flexible tool attuned to case workflows, whilst digital replacements to working with paper bundles remain not fit-for-purpose. I’ll continue by explaining why your current workflow isn’t working, and in the final part will tell you what you need, why, and where to get it.

Throughout this article I’m going to use the term Matter (in capitals) to refer to the legal issues you're working on. Matter, is this way also includes ‘Case’ and ‘Brief’.

In this first part of the article I’ll touch on

• why it’s important to know what kind of work it is that you do before choosing the tools
• the need for having the right tools for the right job

What kind of work do you do?

On the face of it, this is an easy answer, in terms of your job description perhaps, or how you feel about yourself and what you do professionally. But in order to be able to choose the right tools, rather than just falling into ‘choices’ as many of use do (for example there are easily more than 30 direct competitors to Adobe Acrobat Reader, many excellent, yet most of us stick with Acrobat, or whatever our computer came with when we bought it), you need to take a step back and ask yourself, what is it that my clients are paying me for?

PDF Editors are not all things to all people

So, you’re a legal practitioner, what kind of work do you do? At Casedo some legal professionals we speak to tell us “I use a PDF editor.” That suggests that the work they do is just reading / editing documents, and on the face of it this might seem the case. But it isn’t.

Besides the fact that PDFs were originally created to share consistently formatted documents without the need for editing, and that editing PDFs is clunky and time-consuming compared to say using Word, ‘just reading’ PDFs suggests an experience akin to reading a research paper or an essay, ie. in a linear, perhaps chronological, way.

As a lawyer, this is not what you do. You have a Matter before you, comprising of dozens of different documents of many types, you need to need to read and understand, make links, pick out common threads, and so digest the documents. In other words you need to make sense of all the documents related to the Matter, and thus reach professional legal conclusions based on this. It is not a linear reading process, it is non-linear. What you do is make sense of a Matter, how you do it is through non-linear reading of the documents related to that Matter.

Having the right tools for the job in hand is vital

If you’ve got to do some blue-sky thinking for your business, retirement, that novel you’ve been cogitating on for years, you need a pen and paper. There are no external inputs needed for blue-sky thoughts, the opposite, in fact.

But what about your legal work? There are external inputs; client emails, law, and other miscellaneous documents. They often arrive in a hotchpotch of ways, perhaps email or shared storage, and even then they come in different file types that need opening by different applications.

I've got this - But have you really?

You’ve already dealt with this, right? You’ve got a great way of filing your case-related documents, in a case management system or in, for simplicities sake, File Explorer. Add to that a PDF reader for reading documents and Word for editing / creating new documents. You’re satisfied that it works for you, even if it’s not perfect, what else is there to say?

Well, a case management system is for managing documents, not specifically for reading and understanding them. You open and then complete few matters on the same day, meaning that every time you are looking to work on this Matter as it progresses over the following weeks or months, you’re going to have to open each and every file individually. In a paper bundle you’d have everything in one place, in a digital case management workflow you might have hundreds of documents to open individually. Evidently, this is not the right tool for the right job. To stick to the paper analogy, imagine, instead of a single paper bundle each separate document related to that matter was bound and filed separately, that would not be fit-for-purpose.

Paper bundles evolved over many years, they are an excellent benchmark for a fit-for-purpose legal tool. In the next part of the article I’m going to look at paper bundles in more detail, explaining why they’ve been such a difficult tool to replace digitally.

by Jim Hitch