Document Management for Legal Professionals
Legal organizations, like many businesses today, are faced with managing enormous amounts of personal information, confidential work product and personal financial details, with the ever-present threat of cyber-attacks, ransomware and data breaches hanging over their heads. Moving that information efficiently and safely between offices, workers and the client has never been more of a challenge.
The complexity of managing both digital and paper documents will strain even the most skilled and knowledgeable resources, hindering productivity, and increasing operating costs. At the heart of these challenges is the perception and/or reliance on traditional methods of digitizing, storing and retrieving documents.
According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), the average legal professional spends about 30% of their time searching for documents, and many of these documents are often misfiled, costing both time and money. Compounded with the staggering volume of paperwork legal teams generate—about a trillion sheets of paper globally each year.
Toshiba is well positioned to address these challenges and streamline most any digital workflow process. We have the experience, insight and platform tools to help you improve common inefficiencies, reduce back-office costs and increase security measures to protect your information.
Workflow automation
Legacy processes around document intake, digitization and distribution can be rife with bottlenecks and barriers to rapid process sharing. In addition, tenured employees are often resistant to change as certain technologies can be met with workers feeling more comfortable with the way things have always been done.
According to research from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), 15% of all paper documents are misplaced, and 7.5% are completely lost. For legal professionals, this means wasted time, potential compliance issues, and damaged client trust. Law firms, on average, spend $20 to file a document, $120 to find a misplaced document, and $220 to reproduce a lost document. Beyond the direct costs, the environmental impact of paper usage is another concern, with law firms consuming tons of paper and ink each year—expenses that could be dramatically reduced through digitization.
Organizations that have been successful in improving document workflow turn to partners that are skilled in augmenting existing processes with credible and reliable technology, provide a comprehensive and compelling ROI, and providing the education, insight and project management for projects large and small.
Document handling
After the document intake, your legal team requires a workflow that will quickly tie information to legal precedents, allowing them to retrieve, organizing and index to their document management repositories. These processes must adhere to role-based security profiles, reduce or eliminate any filing errors, provide near instant access and maintain security either in the office or to remote locations.
Efficient and secure document handling will improve productivity significantly. Keeping your workers in their existing workspaces, without introducing separate, disparate systems, will mitigate any resistance to change. Additional benefits can be provided by providing logging of access and revisions, maintaining chain of custody, and providing simple tools to share information internally, or to outside personal as required. For example, sending a fax has been a simple process for decades, but keeping a record of the faxed content, and the metadata around transmission, reception, acknowledgement and timing have been legacy challenges. Fortunately, the introduction of a digital fax workflow to accommodate those challenges can be introduced to the workforce with almost no perception to the end user.
Data privacy
Legal organizations handle sensitive, confidential information in most every job function. Security at all levels must be addressed. Client data protection is not only a matter of compliance such as GDPR, HIPAA or CCPA, but is critical to maintaining client trust. Even the smallest of data breaches will carry severe legal and reputational consequences to a law firm.
The most common, yet probably the most insecure, is sharing information via email. The simple act of erroneously sending sensitive information in a message or attaching the wrong file can produce crippling effects. But imagine a process so similar to email, but without any concern of phishing, lack of encryption or attachment vulnerabilities. And what if that platform that would encrypt all content end-to-end, provide IP address tracking across your enterprise and to end users outside of your organization, and be maintained under the watchful eye of your security team and the security profiles they determine. Well imagine no more. It not only exists but Toshiba has been providing that to clients for years.
Solving legal challenges
For legal professionals, the time has come to move beyond the frustration of inefficient, dated and legacy process tied to workflow, document handling and data privacy. Our solutions platforms are designed with your needs in mind. We understand the unique pressures and challenges legal teams face. Toshiba offers a clear path forward. By embracing digital solutions, legal professionals can reclaim lost time, enhance security, and reduce operational expenses – while focusing on what truly matters: serving their clients. Let’s start that conversation today.
