The interface of digital and analog documents in the modern law office can be quite complex and time consuming to deal with properly. Whether you’re working with old case files or physical documents obtained from an opposing party, the process of digitizing those stacks and stacks of papers can create a real strain on your employees’ time. This makes previously efficient administrative processes grind to a slow crawl as valuable team members load and scan page after page.
If this sounds all too familiar, it’s time to consider a better alternative. Legal scanning services can take the labor intensive work of document digitization off your office’s shoulders and allow for increased efficiency across multiple staffing tiers.
The Labor Cost of Scanning
Whether you’re a sole practitioner, a member of a boutique firm, or an office manager at a large multi-partner practice, legal scanning services can revolutionize the way your office runs. Your administrators, paralegals, secretaries, and admin interns have better things to do with their time than to run stacks of briefs, agreements, orders and discovery documents through a scanner.
Even high-volume scanners create a workflow backup as someone ultimately must be responsible for looking through each scanned page to ensure the digital copy turned out as a crisp, clean reproduction of the original.
Ultimately, this is a time-consuming waste of salaried time. Your trained professional support staff has more important functions to fulfill than scanning the documents themselves or checking the work of an unpaid intern who may not be fully invested in getting the job done right the first time. Plus, even the most basic scanning equipment is likely to break down at some point, requiring intervention from IT and other departments to deal with mechanical or computer failures. This all adds up to a process which drains and monopolizes your human, financial, and technological resources.
Why a Trusted Legal Scanning Service is a Must-Have for Your Practice
When you hire an established professional legal document scanning service, you move all of the minutiae off your team’s plate and put it on the shoulders of an outside source that’s in the business of delivering crisp, high quality scanned documents in a confidential environment. Your staff can simply arrange for the digitization process and move on to other tasks, improving overall workflow and freeing up valuable resources for everything from client communication to advertising your services.
This can be an especially good service to take on if your staff doesn’t have the proper training on evolving document scanning techniques, software, and hardware. Legal support staff shouldn’t have to spend their time leafing through manuals and discharging error codes on a complex new scanner. You can save yourself the initial investment on this equipment by outsourcing your scanning tasks to Document Pros.
Electronic Data Discovery: the New Frontier of the Discovery Process
As in all industries, the legal services field is becoming increasingly reliant on digital tools to manage the volumes of information professionals deal with every day. Electronic data discovery (EDD), also known as e-discovery, is the new frontier of the legal discovery process in both federal and state courts.
New technologies have made the process of organizing and storing discovery information easier than ever, but learning and understanding those technologies takes time. If you don’t have the staff available to learn even the basics of these techniques, e-discovery preparation can be a logistical nightmare. Using legal scanning services with EDD expertise introduces efficiency when you need it most.
It is essential, however, to choose a trusted professional service for your EDD processes. The documents used in e-discovery can contain extremely sensitive confidential information which reveals personal financial information, trade secrets, and other data. Information this important must be made inaccessible with proper encryption and password protection, and as digital security evolves to meet new challenges, you’ll want to turn to a team of document professionals who specialize in this very process.
Better Scanning with Optical Character Recognition
Legal scanning services can also use optical character recognition (OCR) to make your scanned and digitized documents completely searchable. Searchable documents are a revolutionary way to take advantage of a computer’s awesome search capabilities. Legal service professionals no longer have to pore over their documents to find essential information. OCR makes it as simple as a few keystrokes to zero in on key terms, dates, and number figures within a massive stack of documents. The process of establishing OCR in scanned documents can include some errors, so it’s best to leave this task to established professionals who know how to work through these types of challenges.
How Document Pros Can Help
Efficiency is the key to a competitive advantage in any field, and it’s especially important in a law office which regularly deals with court deadlines and demanding client expectations. Rather than bogging down your administrative processes with stacks of documents and stubborn scanning equipment, send your legal document scanning needs over to Document Pros. We have more than 30 years of scanning and e-discovery expertise, and we’ve been through every step of this technology’s evolution throughout the decades. As a result, we are comfortable staying on the cutting edge of latest developments in the document scanning industry.