3 ways legal departments can benefit from modern document management

Many legal departments have begun using document management systems to better manage their rising volume of digital documents.

However, these solutions traditionally haven’t been designed to support their unique requirements for such information.

In fact, there’s been a growing understanding among legal departments that document management is unable to meet their requirements for:

• Workflow
• Collaboration
• Email integration
• Document delivery
• Search

In order to succeed in a corporate legal environment, document management systems must meet these and other demands of lawyers and staff, while aligning with the business requirements of the organization.

Modern document management, however, is the next stage in the evolution of productivity solutions for corporate legal departments and users. It delivers an intuitive, consumer-like experience that empowers professionals to work more productively. At the same time, it enables corporate legal departments to be more efficient, agile, and responsive to the changing business environment.

Here are three benefits legal department can realize by using modern document management:

Value to the information

Modern document management is more than a file repository.

It brings value to the information with smart features and capabilities, such as document history, timetables, and visual dashboards, to enhance the value of information stored in legal documents and emails. It also anticipates user actions, with smart document previews, suggested filing locations, and personalized search that delivers more accurate results by remembering who you are and what you search for most often.

Modern document management integrates seamlessly with the tools legal professionals use, including matter management, contract management, and workflow software. It also brings further value to their information by leveraging the power of artificial intelligence to unlock knowledge by analyzing and transforming it into more usable data.

Value to the organization

 As modern document management improves the individual user experience with increased value to the information, it also enhances the value that information delivers at the organizational level.

Modern document management helps legal organizations become more efficient and productive, and deliver better outcomes for the business. The more modern user experience drives user adoption, which means more content is saved, secure, and reusable for the business.

It drastically reduces the time spent across the department searching for the correct document. More importantly, it retains the department’s institutional knowledge, captured in documents and emails, and makes it accessible and reusable. This delivers real benefits to the organization in terms of improved knowledge sharing, best practices, and increased value to the business.

Further, modern document management leverages artificial intelligence to enable new and more valuable search and analytics that help solve business challenges. It also can automate routine, cognitive processes to help professionals work more productively.

Comprehensive Governance and Security

Legal organizations have stringent requirements for the security of documents from both internal and external threats that need to be considered when managing documents. Modern document management also delivers comprehensive security, built on established industry best practices, to protect information assets. Data is encrypted at every stage of work, with security permissions defined by project or client, and automatically applied across all documents or email.

These protections are augmented by comprehensive governance, security, and risk mitigation features, including need-to-know security and ethical walls, to govern and protect information assets. Modern document management also includes advanced threat management to identify security breaches from internal or external bad actors.

iManage goes beyond traditional document management, offering tools that support the entire legal document lifecycle, including creation, management, legal hold, records retention, and disposition. All these capabilities are carefully designed to be unobtrusive and easy to manage for the business user.

Our recent white paper, “Modern Document Management: How Law Departments Can Work Smarter,” details more about the challenges of document management in legal departments and how iManage can help.