If you don’t have the right tools, efficiency and effectiveness will only get you so far

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If you don’t have the right tools, efficiency and effectiveness will only get you so far

You are already a non-linear reader, you just don’t know it yet. You need the right tools to minimise the document admin you’re not aware you’re doing, and get on with your actual work (not the preparation).

If you’ve got to do some blue-sky thinking, you need a pen and paper. There are no external inputs needed.

But what about other types of focused work, what about your legal work? There are external inputs; client emails, law, and other documents. They arrive in a hotchpotch of ways, email or shared storage perhaps, and then they come in different file types that need different applications to open them.

As a legal practitioner, you need to work with numerous documents on any single case, and come up with a ‘view’ on all of those related documents. To do this you have to read all the documents and make sense of them.

Is working with paper bundles all bad?

Traditionally done by printing out copies, putting in a paper bundle, then tabbing it up with a table of contents for an effective way to navigate the documents. You continued to add documents as they arrived, working through the bundle making annotations and comments as necessary. During periods when the case wasn’t moving forward you’d file it somewhere, but you could easily pick up where you left off, whenever you needed to. Once finished with you had a ready-made archive which could be stored appropriately.

Many would decry paper’s inefficiencies, but I would ask two questions:

1. How did you interact with the documents when they were in paper form? There are many ways you’d have worked through the bundle, depending on how you chose to work. However, I can guarantee (almost) that you didn’t start at page one and work through the bundle in a linear fashion. No, you made links and connections between different parts of the bundle, letters and other documents were added at different periods during the course of the case. In other words, you read the bundle

in a non-linear way, you followed the trail of the sense of the matter, not the page numbers.

2. How do you interact with your papers now? If you are still printing your papers to make a paper bundle, then good for you, but this is a poor choice in terms of time and cost. Perhaps you’ve got a digital filing or case management system as outlined above, your way of interacting with the documents is opening them up one-by-one and doing the same every time you want to jump into that case.

More problems with current workflows

What if you are technically proficient enough to create a single bookmarked PDF of all the documents you need? But what happens if, as is bound to happen, you need to add a document at the last minute, recreating that magnificent monolithic document is a long and tedious process.

And then given how you work with documents, how do you create an electronic (or even paper) bundle if you need to go to arbitration or court? You need to create a ‘bundle’ from scratch. Back in the paper days you would already have a bundle to hand, you had begun to make it from day one of the case, it built up over time, and then, when it needed to be shared with the other side or the court, you had to make a clean copy, but at the very least you had a copy to clone. But now, none of this. Not only are you spending huge amount of time opening up individual files,

and having to search across them individually, making links between them is tiresome, and making a bundle another chore in itself. It’s as if all the benefits of the paper bundle have been taken away just to save time and money in the creation of a paper bundle. One set of inefficiencies have been replaced with another.

The Solution?

What is needed is a solution that replicates the paper bundle benefits, adding a digital twist in terms of search, speed and an annotation feature set, whilst removing the inconvenience of the hard copy process. It needs to be able to create a Table of Contents at a touch of a button, and include complex pagination options.

What it absolutely must preserve is the ability to work and read documents in a non-linear fashion, enabling the mind to focus and move seamlessly within the bundle, making connections of understanding. It needs to be flexible enough to work how a practitioner wants to work, pick up where they left off, and bundle and/or archive toward the end of the process without much ado. At Casedo we have built this solution, it’s available and we’d love you to try it.

For 20% off your first year go to www.casedo. com/getcasedo/ and use code SOLO22 before the end of the year. Otherwise, you can try Casedo free for 30 Days.

Jim Hitch is the CEO at Casedo

spg.uk.com