Legal Document Management

ClearPeople and Microsoft recently published a case study that highlights how the SharePoint platform can be leveraged for vertical document management solutions. In this case, we see how SharePoint has been extended to provide legal document management capabilities, clearly demonstrating that SharePoint can be much more than a simple file share. Going Legal With SharePointClearPeople is an expert hand when it comes to tweaking SharePoint systems for the legal community. The company began as a legal services specialist. However, it also offers tools with a wider appeal, such as the recently launched PeoplePoint and CorpCast.

TMG Document Solutions, which specializes in copying, digitalimaging, and binding services for legal, insurance, corporate, andmedical companies, is using advanced technology from BÖWE BELL + HOWELL to help its law firm clients lighten their workloads — while at the same time raising its own productivity by 30%. Submitted by BÖWE BELL + HOWELL

The job of a records management office is to take all paper documents that need to be preserved, from all county offices, and implement a strategy to preserve them. For many years, the law mandated that all permanent records be preserved on microfilm. When the law changed on January 1, 2001 to allow digitally scanned copies to be legal documents, the challenge to find a preservation system that would be both efficient and cost effective increased dramatically.

Paper and records pose a major dilemma for growing credit unions. Today's credit unions struggle to balance access, storage, retrieval, and stringent legal requirements. While all want to improve processes, many labor just to maintain the status quo. Truliant Federal Credit Union faced this dilemma. Submitted by Optical Image Technology

Like many managed care insurance organizations today, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona (BCBSAZ) faces a daunting array of technical and organizational challenges to keep pace in an increasingly competitive environment. Recently, the Phoenix-based insurer automated the capture and storage of all its Human Resource documents for secure storage in a FileNet content management system, which provides access to qualified managers, legal, and H-R specialists. Submitted by Datacap

User stories from the knowledge frontLawyers in one of the nation's largest law firms will gain a single point of access to legal and corporate information through a new software tool.Pillsbury Winthrop will integrate Enfish Professional for Workgroups from Enfish into its new advanced client relationship management system. The deployment will enable lawyers to securely display data, including documents, e-mail and other information regardless of where it is stored.

Enterprises of all sizes have to comply with an increasing number of legal and regulatory obligations, many of which require companies to be able to locate and authenticate documents and official company records. As a result, companies are taking steps – if they haven't already – to implement comprehensive, company-wide records management systems. Used with permission from Integrated Solutions magazine

Registering and filing these contracts and monitoring their status are extremely important tasks, particularly for complex and valuable materials contracts. In fact, materials contracts are so detailed and important that the legal department of Akzo Nobel dedicates 100 employees at 20 different locations just to register and manage these documents. Submitted by ZyLAB

When you have to conduct a formal discovery (for legal or regulatory reasons, e.g. a FOIA request in government) and you don't have a document and records management system, you're forced into an expensive, hunt-and-peck process that may not drum up all the relevant files. Yet, twice in the past month I've heard from a records manager, to paraphrase: "Now that we've put all our documents in a proper electronic repository, we have the opposite problem -- full-text search results yield too many hits and we still need lawyers to review the resultsets." Clearly, better metadata would help here. But in any case, content management technology is surely just the first step -- and not the last -- to better discovery. Consult our Records Management Report for more details.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software can guarantee that legal contracts, records, and documents are no longer lost or misplaced. It simplifies case management and litigation support, making documents available with the click of a mouse.