Easy and secure legal document management
Legal professionals sink a massive amount of time into editing documents. Whether it’s tiny adjustments to please a picky client or massive rewrites to address shifting case law, we’re always making new drafts.
That’s exactly why Filevine’s latest feature is making waves. It’s called Edit in Place, and it dramatically simplifies legal document management.
Making change easy
Of all the massive changes hitting modern legal work, perhaps the most striking are the new ways we can manage documents.
I recently spoke with an attorney who left his practice for a decade to be a successful politician. When he returned back to his legal work, his greatest challenge was learning the new world of doc management.
“You don’t even print anything out anymore!” he said to me, astonished.
This man had decades of high-powered experience under his belt. But without an intern showing him the basics of cloud editing and electronic filing, he says he doesn’t think he could have returned to the work.
And in another ten years, legal document management will be even more efficient, accessible, and secure, in ways we can’t even imagine today. But only if both attorneys and legal tech providers constantly learn and develop.
It’s in that spirit that Filevine introduces Edit in Place.
How it works
Edit in Place means that Filevine users don’t have to download and re-upload documents to make changes.
Instead, just click the document’s ‘Edit’ button in Filevine. This opens the document with your device’s own Microsoft Office software. When you make your changes and press ‘Save,’ the new version will automatically upload to the case file in Filevine.
Filevine users are already finding that Edit in Place smooths and simplifies their workflow. Here are some use cases we’ve seen:
- A business attorney prepared a contract during negotiations. As the terms changed, she was able to rapidly update her evolving draft.
- An injured client noticed his attorney made a mistake on his complaint draft. The attorney made the change immediately within Filevine.
- A legal team collaborated on a motion, and found it simple to adjust each others’ drafts with new ideas or corrections.
- An attorney wrote the outlines of a motion, but was then due in court. He used Filevine to task a paralegal with finishing it, without needing to transfer files.
With Edit in Place, Filevine users not only gain greater efficiency. They also reduce the risk of losing a document. Legal teams don’t have to trust each member to be scrupulous in re-uploading documents to the correct case file. The process is automatic, intuitive, and secure.
The Doc Management Revolution
To understand the full value of Edit in Place, it should be seen in context of the entire suite of Filevine’s document management capabilities.
These tools simplify each stage of your work, from creation to archiving. Instead of recreating common documents, you can use automatic document generation. All docs are automatically hyperlinked from the case file, which allows you to review them in context. And document tagging makes file-finding even easier. You can text a document to a client and have them add a secure e-signature from their smartphones.
And all of this is stored in the cloud, meaning those documents are always accessible and easy to share with collaborators, with full access to the revision history. On top of that, it’s all protected with obsessive security measures at each stage.
But even with these impressive features, Filevine isn’t resting. We’ll keep moving forward. We’ll keep bringing our users first-to-market document management solutions. Because we understand what’s at stake.
The Stakes of Legal Document Management
Bad document management can cause massive headaches for a legal team. The most conspicuous problems might be all those malpractice claims stemming from “improper preparation, filing, and/or document transmission.” Or it might be the nail-biting security risks of improperly filing sensitive information.
But the less dramatic problems might add up to an even greater catastrophe.
Every day, legal professionals waste a massive amount of time dealing with documents. The global market intelligence firm IDC quantified this loss. They found that every week an information worker wastes about 6 hours of their time on document management. This includes searching for unfindable documents; rewriting documents that can’t be found; dealing with inefficient, hard-copy documents instead of electronic ones; and fixing the version control problems of sloppy collaboration.
The bottom line? This wasted time costs about $19,732 per worker per year. That amounts to a loss of 21.3% of an organization’s total productivity.
But while the numbers are awful, there’s also a silver lining squirreled away in there. Smart document management can give your team an extraordinary boost to efficiency and productivity.
Document management tools — like Filevine’s smooth Edit in Place capability — can give you back your time.
To see Filevine’s full range of document management capabilities, schedule a demo.