The Ultimate Checklist on Document Management Software for Law Firms

Regardless of your business targets, it is well past time to go paperless by adopting legal software document management.

Today, law firms manage a variety of content ‘? paper documents, spreadsheets, digital files, scanned cases, or images. Most corporations store their documentation on multiple sources, including public and private networks, shared drives, hard drives, filing cabinets, and even emails. Manually managing these files can be a challenging task. Such a maze of information silos and repositories causes higher risks of files being lost or damaged, as well as errors or redundancies. What’s more, paper stacks require significant storage space.

Ditching hard copies for contract management software from your law firm business processes can offer numerous benefits to your organization. Increasing productivity, reducing costs, and work-related stress, and simplifying team workloads are only part of them. Law office document management software requires not only investments in advanced tech solutions, but a commitment to following new practices. But once you’ve made the switch, you will carry out business smarter, faster, and more efficiently than ever before.

Ditching hard copies from your law firm business processes offers numerous benefits such as increasing productivity, reducing costs and work-related stress.

Below, we will discuss and define document management software for lawyers, unlock its benefits, and guide you through its must-have features.

What is document management software for law firms?

Legal document management software (DMS) is an entirely automated software solution, specially designed to store and handle business files. But it is much more than cloud storage. Thanks to document management software for lawyers, it is easy to organize, secure, capture, digitize, tag, approve, and complete tasks with digital documents.

95% of corporate documentation is still paper-based. Paper actually costs firms up to $20,000 per year, per employee, while paper stacks account for more than 21% of workforce productivity loss. Even more, 86% of employees state they have difficulties when searching for documents, spending approximately 18 minutes to locate a file.

On average, 50% of working hours are wasted on creating, preparing, and versioning documents. On top of that, almost three-quarters of the staff cannot electronically sign online documents using their smartphone.

Here is when legal software document management comes to the rescue. The software integrates multiple data sets to ensure continuous control and access to files, collaboration, and secure tracking, as well as sending sensitive content.

Benefits of law office DMS

The system delivers essential benefits for corporate information retrieval, process security, managing documentation throughout the overall lifecycle, and offering low-cost operations.

1. Elimination of paperwork

Even if your business is still paper-based, you can let legal document management software handle automating and streamlining legal operations.

2. Accessibility of services regardless of geographies

Being cloud-based, document management software for law firms can be accessed from anywhere with an Internet connection.

3. Document visibility

Law office document management software provides convenient and systematized digital tools to ensure complete visibility of legal operations and workforce productivity.

4. Smart distribution of lawyer time and a boost in productivity

Document management software for lawyers makes data transferring, storage, sharing, and collaboration much easier by:

  • eliminating the need to review routine contracts (NDAs, DPAs, SLAs, etc.)
  • reducing the time spent drafting documents
  • streamlining the process of updating templates for regular files
  • automating and streamlining the process for drafting and negotiating supply, licensing and services contracts for procurement

5. Improved service quality

Thanks to the entire legal data flow optimization, document management software for law firms helps make better and faster managerial decisions.

6. Enhanced security

11% of files are shared externally, and 9% are distributed to third parties with sensitive data. Almost one-fifth of collaboration requests were sent outside of the company to email addresses like Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail. With document management software at hand, you can keep sensitive data safe and protected.

Essential features of document management software for lawyers

Legal document management software offers law firms advanced functionality to meet specific business targets. Let’s uncover each of them.

1. Cloud storage

AXDRAFT operates 100% in the cloud. Document management software allows you to store large data sets and search for various file versions. If you opt for your existing centralized file storage, then you can upload AXDRAFT files using an MS Word format or ‘.PDF.’?

2. Security

With AXDRAFT, you control your sensitive data. Thus, you create all your confidential documents only on your PC and never touch our servers. We store only your template, which does not contain any personal data. A template is then securely transferred through an encrypted channel to your computer, where you add your confidential details.

We use bank-level 256-bit encryption and TLS 1.2 protocols while storing your templates on servers in Western Europe. On top of this, the AXDRAFT dev team regularly performs security checks to ensure your templates and sensitive data are safe and protected.

3. Complete version control

AXDRAFT allows consumers to retrieve a file’s previous version or continue working from a selected point. Version control is essential for current documents that require regular updating.

4. Integrations with other services

In a matter of seconds, AXDRAFT integrates data from public registers and your firm’s internal databases directly into your document. We are connected to the U.S. and 42 other countries’ corporate registers. As a result, you get more accurate, relevant data with fewer manual inputs.

5. Sophisticated search options

AXDRAFT provides advanced indexing, retrieval, and search options to help users find corporate information based on file identifiers, metadata, and content.

6. Tag management

Managed documents are automatically classified, highly traceable, and can be tagged on rules you configure. This process allows you to track them down quickly and provides automated alerts via AXDRAFT.

7. Document backup

AXDRAFT ensures 24-hour full database backups, including all database objects, system tables, data, and transactions.

8. Mobile-friendly

With the AXDRAFT mobile version, you can work easily with documents on the go.

9. Flexibility of workflows

You can assign different user access levels, controlling permissions to a broad working group, or even a single document.

10. Notifications

With AXDRAFT, users can subscribe and be notified about file edits or changes to document classes ‘? the document is added, document is edited, or document is deleted; new document versions; file’s expiration status.

11. Collaboration

The collaboration feature enables multiple users on your legal team to view and modify files simultaneously. The system monitors all changes and their history. Additionally, AXDRAFT provides real-time collaboration with vendors and customers on legal documents without registering them as AXDRAFT.

12. User roles

This feature allows you to control various working groups or individual access levels, eliminating sensitive data breaches.

Legal document management software can save your law firm time and money, providing security, access control, cloud storage, streamlined document search, and retrieval.

The bottom line

Going paperless is no longer a wish; it is a must. Advanced document management systems automate all the monotonous work, allowing you to focus on top-priority tasks. AXDRAFT document management software for law firms handles all the above to cover each of your needs. Do not hesitate to contact us and seize the day!

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