 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
How one innovative law firm pursued
the elusive, “paperless office” goal …
and pretty much made it happen.
By J. Stanford Morse, Esq. - Partner, Attorney
January 21, 2010
Law Offices of J. Stanford Morse, PA
Challenge:
Design workflows that link firm software tools
and minimize the reliance on paper documents.
Solution:
Install Worldox, integrating it with Needles and Fujitsu
scanners; deploy the new wdAlert Worldox utility.
Result:
A much smoother and more controlled workflow; a dramatic
reduction in paper files.
“I wanted to simplify my life. Worldox helped me do just that.”
“Worldox is the single most cost-effective purchase I have made in 30 years of practicing law.”
“Training is minimal. Work flow capacity has increased. At the same time, overhead decreased and the bottom line improved.”
Background
With more than 30 years of legal experience, J Stanford Morse P.A.
specializes in automobile accidents and wrongful death cases. Efficiency
and productivity matter here. We never hesitate to implement
technology solutions where there will be a quantifiable gain in those
areas.
We have long wanted to move to a “less paper-intensive” style of work.
We already use the Needles Case Management System, and find it well
suited to our litigation practice areas. Document management seemed
to be the next logical step; we’re a small firm, but still have thousands
upon thousands of documents, emails and scanned files.
The Plan
Our team contacted InTouch Legal, a leading document management
integrator. They suggested Worldox, then demonstrated it us. Together
we drew up a plan on how to apply Worldox features to improve our
workflow. Right from the beginning, this software felt like a good fit
with what we were trying to achieve. In January 2009, I gave the go-ahead.
InTouch was onsite here for three days setting up the Worldox application suite.
Objectives
Worldox/Needles integration:
We needed tight integration of document management with Needles,
so that our staff could pull up a case within Needles, and be able to
with a single click access all case-related documents and emails in
Worldox.
Integration with Office Scanners
InTouch suggested that we integrate Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners with
Worldox to speed processing of received documents. Great idea. Now
we simply insert documents to be scanned into the ADF tray and press
a button. The document is scanned, OCR applied to the image (allowing
for text searches in Worldox), and image corrections are applied
automatically. Documents then “magically” appear on workstations as
Adobe Acrobat files. Saving in Adobe also saves documents to Worldox.
Document Alerts
We also needed a way to let me know when new, scanned documents
are ready for my review. InTouch found the solution in a new Worldox
wdAlert module – which was still in pre-release testing. This utility
searches for documents tagged for review, then prompts me to act as
they are found.
Conclusion
It comes down to this: I wanted to simplify my life. Worldox and
InTouch helped me do just that.
We’ve moved away from the traditional email attachment mode,
keeping everything inside the DMS now, no longer cluttering up
Outlook with duplicate document attachments. I am very happy with
this new system. Worldox and InTouch exceeded our expectations at
each stage of the process.
Worldox is the single most cost-effective purchase I have made in 30
years of practicing law. Training is minimal. Work flow capacity has
increased. At the same time, overhead decreased, and the bottom line
improved.
