Document Management for Legal / Contracts

Settlements, leases, partnership contracts, deeds and grants, incorporations, trusts, divorce suits, public records; what do they all have in common? They all traditionally exist on paper. In the world of legal firms they are central to the process of legal transactions. Unfortunately, many challenges arise with this substantial amount of paper; such as how to effectively collaborate, secure, distribute, duplicate, share, store, retrieve, and potentially destroy these business critical documents.

Legal documentation, more than most paper-based transactions, has a long lifecycle and needs to be protected. They cannot risk being exposed to unauthorized viewing and tampering, or potentially damaged or destroyed by a disaster such as a fire or flood, or even theft. Another challenge presented to legal firms is how to reduce the cost of operations when many firms are located in expensive real estate locations. Why waste money on expensive office space filled with filing cabinets? Thousands of files can be reduced to a few gigabytes of space for electronic storage. Use the office space for people not paper.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM), specifically, document management with workflow, is an ideal solution for these challenges. Paper-based documentation is intensive and usually requires many steps and significant staff to process. Your goal: Reduce operating costs, increase productivity, and enhance client and employee satisfaction by streamlining these archaic paper-based processes.

At KnowledgeLake, we deliver document capture and imaging solutions designed for these challenges. Our industry-leading Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software takes the hassles out of paperwork and provides a lower cost of ownership and higher return on investment than the competition. With our help, you will spend less time chasing paper and more time doing what you do best; serving people. The KnowledgeLake solution provides legal firms with fast, easy scanning of paper and the capture of electronic documents, along with sophisticated indexing of these documents for faster search and retrieval. The easy-to-understand SharePoint interface minimizes training, and easily integrates with most line-of-business systems, enabling document imaging for applications where it was otherwise unavailable or cost-prohibitive. You can share, distribute, and collaborate across diverse applications, business processes, and platforms.

KnowledgeLake ECM solutions increase productivity between staff, partners, and clients. They can reduce or eliminate time-consuming duplicate data entry and routing of information. Once paper has been converted to digitally formatted information, typically by scanning the paper, it can be handled much faster and more efficiently. Documents and transactions can be linked by key metadata tags and then automatically routed based on business rules placed upon the values held within the document.

Even the process of capturing the data can be optimized with features such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR), data validation, and database index lookups. Integration with backend systems, front-end systems, and database repositories can help match and auto-populate key metadata fields and triggers. These validation and automation steps reduce data entry errors and enhance accuracy and processing efficiencies.

The routing of information around the organization via an automated electronic workflow can eliminate paperwork delays, and enable staff to easily track files through their process lifecycle. Legal firms can streamline operations and deliver better client services through more efficient business flow processes. Subsequently, this increases productivity, reduces cost, and achieves regulatory compliance.

KnowledgeLake has helped hundreds of organizations do more with less by streamlining document-intensive, back-office routines. Areas within the Legal profession that benefit greatly from ECM include: contract management, case management, consolidations, mergers, records management, human resources and accounting.

Working with your staff, Knowledgelake can help deploy a solution that results in:

• Faster Collaboration and decision making with easy access to key documents. Enable local and remote access to documents allowing staff to work from home or the field rather than late nights at the office.
• Immediate Processing of Files - documents move through the system more efficiently.
• Achieving government environmental mandates by reducing the need for paper.
• Proof of compliance with legal requirements via reporting, discovery requests and audit trails.
• Reduced operating costs associated with labor, printing, mailing, data entry and more.
• Line of Business Integration that enables users to immediately retrieve supporting documents from various proprietary and legacy applications.
• Shared secured information for staff and associates with concurrent access to content. Ability to collaborate on documents improves the efficiency of all processes, and enhanced electronic security protects client privacy.
• Faster user adoption that results from the intuitive SharePoint interface.
• Higher security by using redaction or encryption technologies to protect selective pages and portions of PDF and TIFF files, allowing only specific users to view various areas within a document.
• Improved Customer Service - expedites administrative processes, shortening the time needed to make decisions from months and weeks to just hours. Customer inquiries regarding case status can be answered more accurately and quickly, reducing traditional delays associated with file search and retrieval.

KnowledgeLake's ECM software for Microsoft SharePoint enables you to organize unstructured content and store it in SharePoint. This tight integration of KnowledgeLake products with SharePoint enhances your existing technology investment through:

• Low cost of entry and ownership by leveraging your existing IT investments.
• Leveraging your existing scanning investments including scanners, copiers (MFP) and fax devices.
• Metadata driven searches that provide fast search capabilities to maximize employee productivity.
• Total Enterprise Content Management (ECM) with SharePoint that lets users scan, index, search, view and manage content.
• Browser experience of SharePoint for document management, records management, and web content management.