Despite the need of document management,not every legal firm knows what is meant by this term. What is document management? What is a document management system or DMS? What is legal document management? This information will provide information to resolve these questions and discuss the way it affects a legal practice.
What Is Document Storage?
To accurately define ‘document management’,an individual must first contrast it with simple document storage. Document storage is the thing that the term says,a location to hold documentation – typically using folders. As an example,a computer’s hard disk drive is a type of document storage. Another example is actually a shared server drive in the office,which is a shared form of document storage. Cloud-based document storage,for example Google Drive and Dropbox,are as effective the main difference is simply because they are stored in the cloud rather than in an office server or your personal computer.
Document storage is the action of placing documents in the secure area for future retrieval either individually or with other individuals. Nothing occurs to the documents while stored,and users cannot affect the documents beyond viewing or editing them when allowed access.
What Is Document Management?
When you consider document storage to become a passive task,then document management can be defined as a dynamic task. Document management is carried out using a documented management system,which happens to be most typically called DMS. Technological acronyms are gaining popularity daily.
The document management system,or DMS,provides the user resources to manage,organise making the documents more useful for the legal firm. It is essential to remember that document management system provides different services to document storage,like the following:
- version management – allowing users to see each version in the document,as well as restore and compare past versions of documentation.
- index and search – a good DMS indexes each document and email stored inside the system thereby,making all the documents searchable.
- document look at and check in – allowing users to check different documents out thereby,keeping other individuals from making changes for the document.
- automatic OCR – a service provided by high-quality document management systems including integration of your automatic OCR,which converts scanned things to text-enabled documents. This ensures that all documents are indexed and searchable.
- fax and scan integration – certain document management systems integrate directly by using a company’s scanner and fax machine thereby,streamlining the workflow by having scanned documents go into the DMS directly.
What Is Legal Document Management?
Legal document management refers to utilizing a specialised DMS made especially for legal firms. While a legal practice can implement general-purpose document management systems,these tend to be developed for the masses rather than especially for legal firms. Consequently,the normal-purpose DMS can miss legal-specific functionality. Certain functionality that is certainly specific to legal DMS includes the subsequent:
- email management
- matter-centricity
- document tagging
Final Words
As can be seen,document management systems are highly beneficial to manage the documents in the company. By making use of legal document management,it is possible to improve the efficiency of your legal business.
For more information please see this -