Despite the need of document management,not every legal firm understands what is meant by this term. What is document management? What exactly is a document management system or DMS? What is legal document management? This short article will provide information to answer these questions and discuss how it affects a legal practice.
Precisely What Is Document Storage?
To accurately define ‘document management’,somebody must first contrast it with simple document storage. Document storage is really what the expression says,a place to hold documentation – typically using folders. For instance,a computer’s hard disk is a kind of document storage. Another example is actually a shared server drive in the cloud,and that is a shared type of document storage. Cloud-based document storage,for example Google Drive and Dropbox,are as effective the visible difference is they are kept in the cloud rather than in an office server or your pc.
Document storage is the act of placing documents in a secure area for future retrieval either individually or with other people. Nothing happens to the documents while stored,and users cannot alter the documents beyond viewing or editing them when allowed access.
Precisely What Is Document Management?
If you consider document storage as a passive task,then document management can be defined as a dynamic task. Document management is conducted employing a documented management system,that is most commonly referred to as DMS. Technological acronyms are gaining popularity day-to-day.
The document management system,or DMS,provides the user resources to manage,organise making the documents more useful for the legal firm. It is important to note that document management system provides different services to document storage,including the following:
version management – allowing users to examine each version of the document,and also restore and compare past versions of documentation.
index and look – a good DMS indexes each document and email stored in the system thereby,making every one of the documents searchable.
document check out and view in – allowing users to check different documents out thereby,keeping other individuals from making changes towards the document.
automatic OCR – a service offered by high-quality document management systems including integration of your automatic OCR,which converts scanned things to text-enabled documents. This makes certain that all documents are indexed and searchable.
fax and scan integration – certain document management systems integrate directly with a company’s scanner and fax machine thereby,streamlining the workflow through scanned documents enter in the DMS directly.
Precisely What Is Legal Document Management?
Legal document management means using a specialised DMS made particularly for legal firms. While a legal practice can implement general-purpose document management systems,these are typically produced for the masses rather than specially for legal firms. Consequently,the general-purpose DMS can miss legal-specific functionality. Certain functionality that may be specific to legal DMS includes the next:
- email management
- matter-centricity
- document tagging
Final Words
As can be seen,document management systems are highly useful to manage the documents in a company. By utilizing legal document management,you may improve the efficiency of your legal practice.
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