Life’s melodramas certainly make colorful scenic backdrops for legal practices. Whether you handle divorce, corporate negligence, routine contracts, or wills and testaments, stories often are hidden amid a slew of documents. Finding the truth and exposing charlatans can be fascinating, but you don’t need behind-the-scenes drama as you sort through unwieldy files, rushing to meet rigid deadlines.

Despite increasing demands for quick access, some documents—by requirement--are still retained on paper. This creates a hybrid digital and paper file environment that’s challenging to manage. To minimize costs, you need to reduce file clutter and duplication; enable effective search; and manage files consistently. Yet no method works unless everyone follows identical rules--flawlessly. If you’re lucky, your system may reveal human fallibility in recordkeeping, but it probably doesn’t prevent it.

Constantly changing regulations and human fallibility make it unrealistic to expect staff to maintain perfect records. EDM software helps by standardizing and unifying your approach to information management, consistently ensuring all documents and information are managed using identical security, classification, access, and processing rules. Business process management (BPM/workflow) tools add significant value, pushing and pulling vital information wherever authorized staff needs it. By combining best practices with current business rules and stored information (due dates, case number, assigned counsel, etc.), routine processes move forward logically, reliably, and automatically.

The result? Current data (such as a date/time stamp) constantly reprioritizes work, delivering timely task lists and related documents to designated persons for action. Staff completes work quickly, confident sensitive files are secure, their decisions are based on current information, and processes are following up-to-date policies. No more waiting for files; scrambling to meet deadlines; conjecturing what demands attention most urgently.

Let’s examine how automation improves costefficiency and profitability in three critical areas:

• Managing deadlines

• Complying with reporting requirements

• Invoice processing

Managing deadlines

Let’s face it: lawyers keep lots of balls in the air. Some inevitably get dropped. It’s difficult to prioritize and track efficiently with challenges encroaching from multiple sides:

• Statute of limitations

• Procedural, litigation, and tort claims deadlines

• Internal timelines

• Time limitations

Incorrectly entered data, mishandled/lost mail, notices that weren’t forwarded or inaccurately interpreted court rules result in missed hearings and late responses to deadlines. The last thing you want is a spoiled reputation or costly legal malpractice claims. Unless your calendaring software is thoroughly integrated with your business systems, you’re relentlessly chasing information and correcting mistakes.

Rules-based BPM/workflow juggles myriad rules for you, organizing details, managing timelines, and letting you focus your skills where they’re demanded. Whether you need a month, several weeks, or a few days’ notice to answer requests, stored information coalesces with your practice’s directives to deliver notifications, files, and information promptly. Turnaround accelerates; you can help more clients.

Complying with reporting requirements

Automating desktop-to-courthouse reporting significantly eases compliance while increasing efficiency, improving accuracy, and lowering costs. EDM and BPM facilitate reporting by associating related documentation, packaging pertinent files for review, and making reporting standardized, automatic, and quick. No matter what you require-–client interviews; evidence; pertinent statistical, documentary, and legal research; deposition summaries- –BPM/workflow software dependably collects what you need, repurposes it via your instructions, delivers timely reports, and archives files appropriately.

Envision your practice with:

• One secure repository for all legal content

• Thoroughly indexed files that authorized persons can retrieve easily, securely, and instantly

• Tasks delivered to staff in priority order, with pertinent documentation

• Secure, web-enabled document access from any location

• Rules-based software that pushes required data and documents wherever they are needed

• Version tracking and document rollbacks for easy comparative review

Then imagine your software:

• Assembling and packaging related documentation for reports, ediscovery, and audits

• Re-using deadlines and information about document requirements to advance routine processes

• Notifying appropriate persons when requested documents are missing/ incomplete

• Packaging travel/expense documentation for easier reporting and client billing

• Providing instant oversight to address client inquiries

… assisting wherever work is routine or burdensome.

Complying with regulations and meeting reporting demands requires careful planning. Strategic planning keeps EDM and BPM ready and waiting, responding immediately as new rules are introduced or information is received. No more desperate pleas for extensions: the system informs you what needs to happen, what’s next, and where everything is located.

Why struggle to manage everything when EDM and BPM can do the juggling for you?

Invoice processing: get paid promptly

Integrating your case management, customer database, EDM, and accounting systems-–and using BPM/workflow software to orchestrate prescribed actions-–results in fast, accurate, and easy invoicing. Information about each client case drives processes forward automatically, ensuring:

1. Billing is generated promptly as project milestones are reached.

2. Invoices are accurate.

3. Payments flow into your office as quickly as possible.

EDM and BPM complement your existing invoicing process, enabling:

• Travel and expense documentation to be assembled with receipt images and links to pertinent service agreements.

• GL codes to be assigned and exported directly into your accounting system, eliminating manual errors.

• Invoices to be generated automatically as milestones are met.

• Email alerts to be sent to appropriate person(s) to request invoice approval (or payment).

• Missing documentation to be sent automatically to an exception processing queue.

• Approved invoices to be forwarded with printed/digital PDFs of documentation (as rules dictate), extracting billing addresses from the client database.

The result:

• Billing is prompt and accurate.

• Payment is quick.

• No overlooked billing opportunities.

• More time for meaningful work.

Automated matching, approval, invoicing, and payment collection lessens your burden, keeping you focused on revenuegenerating projects and client services.

Keep your show on the road

EDM and BPM/workflow take care of behind-the-scenes operations so you can stay focused on your clients. Together, they relegate the drama and stress of managing details to the annals of history, letting you focus on your clients so you can give each and every one of them the quality performance they deserve.

So what are you waiting for?