The huge number of documents involved in any proceeding, made the invention of document management almost inevitable. For lawyers, court workers, assistants and others who must work with lengthy documents, Sharepoint’s ability to automate working with the many documents involved can be a valuable time-saver. Beyond the words and meanings that give a document its value, the significant aspect of any document is who works with it and what they do with the document. Most documents must be handled at times by staff, clients, court system workers or other involved parties.

Sharepoint’s strength is the way that it relates documents to the group of people that use them and the work processes that must be performed on these documents. Because documents contain information that is created, edited, approved, stored and retrieved by varied people in a group, the movement of documents between people is an important factor in document management. Sharepoint makes it easier to move documents between people and also facilitates how those people work with each document.

One of the repetitive tasks in some document management systems was entering meta-data to classify each document. Full text searching allows the Sharepoint document management system to rapidly classify documents and to rapidly find the text, which for each person, gives the document meaning. Instead of spending time categorizing each document with meta-data using some pre-ordained keyword system, users can quickly tag a document with the terms that are most relevant to them. The documents can also be tagged with meta-data such as document author, client number or practice group.

Sharepoint record management can automatically send documents to the proper Sharepoint document library. Documents can then be searched by meta-data or searched by full text search which allows searching across all documents for the same topic. The result is less time searching for the documents needed for a client and more time spent creating quality deliverable documents for clients. Automated workflow procedures can be standardized for certain documents, assigning certain staff members the tasks of researching, discovery, writing, editing or other tasks related to a client matter.

All the authorized users in a group can share and work with documents across the company intranet or the documents can be made available to clients using the extranet. To protect client privacy and confidentiality, documents are protected by security and permissions that allow each user access to view or change documents only as needed.

Each user can access the documents on a Sharepoint portal site, which you can think of as a home page for the project. The basic SharePoint portal page is built with modules called Webparts. Each of the Webparts modules performs a specific function; acting as a calendar, task list, discussion forum or shared document area. Users can add the Webparts they need for each project, allowing the Sharepoint portal page to be customized for the tasks that the work group needs to perform. The Webparts also allow adding wikis, blogs and search capabilities to the Sharepoint portal site. For specialized functions, Unbounded Solution consultants can add custom built Webparts to your Sharepoint portal home page.

The SharePoint portal can also provide enterprise search. Sharepoint integration allows accessing other enterprise content management platforms to leverage existing systems used by the law firm. Because Sharepoint can search and use data from many other data systems, the Sharepoint portal can act as a hub to pull data directly from your firm’s time and billing software. Sharepoint can also send requests to external databases, including databases, and then return the search result of the external system. The ability to quickly search law firm documents, external databases, as well as all the law firm’s other data, billing and calendar systems from a single Sharepoint portal allows lawyers and staff to minimize searching for what they need and increase billable hours.

Sharepoint’s document retention capability allows enforcing law firm policies for document storage, archiving, retention periods and eventual disposal of documents. This allows reduced risk and liability in document management.

Unbounded Solutions consultants have the deep experience to quickly build custom Sharepoint portals for your law firm’s document management. Our consultants can also build custom workflows that conform to the way that your firm does business procedures.

MAXIMIZING ENTERPRISE PERFORMANCE, ONE UNBOUNDED SOLUTION AT A TIME.