Have you heard the one about the lawyer and the mountain of paperwork? No seriously, all terrible lawyer jokes aside, law firms need to deal with a huge quantity of documents on a daily basis. The entire legal profession is based on paperwork and deadlines. Effective management of that paperwork is vital to the outcome of each case, not to mention the success of a law firm’s operations.
As Mark Donald discussed at the Association of Corporate Counsel’s annual conference this month, legal professionals can leverage open source technology as a valuable tool to save time and money. In the session entitled “InExpensive/Free Applications for Your Law Department”, legal professionals explored how open source technology can be a particularly effective way to eliminate unnecessary expenses and streamline legal document and business process management.
The process of creating a legal document requires a constant flow of paperwork from one person to another. Legal documents often demand inputs, edits, and approvals from a variety of internal and external sources, such as clients, opposing counsel, prosecutors, and government agencies. The resulting output documents like contracts, agreements, briefs, and filings must be filed with the correct people and places by strict deadlines, and then archived with specific and personalized naming and numbering conventions. Efficiency, accuracy, and privacy are the name of the legal document game.
Effectively generating and managing legal documents implies a time-consuming and meticulous process that eats up valuable resources. But proprietary BPM software solutions can be costly and clunky. So what’s a small law firm or legal department to do?
Enter open source technology. As Mr. Donald points out, open source business process management technology can help streamline the legal document creation process without the steep overhead costs and upfront investments of a proprietary BPM system. Open source BPM is easier to integrate with other open source systems like document management systems like KnowledgeTree. When used in conjunction with a document management system, open source BPM systems can automate the entire document lifecycle, from the initial creation of a document (or request for creation), editing, storage, retrieval, and archiving. BPM systems can also help law firms can comply with regulations by keeping documents for a specific amount of time as required by law. Role-based controlled access to secure document repositories ensures the privacy of documents and data. And, a web-based system allows lawyers to easily access documents remotely while at home or on the road, so work is never more than a browser away.
With the ability of open source software to help firms save serious time and money, the legal profession’s movement towards e-files and e-filings, and the ability of technology to improve the practice of law, it’s no wonder that open source software is attracting attention.
