Skip to main content

The pain of finding a document in your emails

Why is it so hard?


Email is a great platform for asynchronous communication. Its roots go all the way back to the beginning of the internet with ARPANET. The engineers who put together ARPANET and the early email protocols were very smart, but they could not have foreseen all the possible applications computers and the internet would see in the future. And that is why finding documents in email chains is difficult. The sending and receiving of documents and document links along with the email messages, along with other features, were tacked on later. And for that reason they are not optimized for document retrieval. The problem is doubly difficult for law firms since not only do documents need to be assigned with particular email chains, they need to be assigned to clients and particular matters as well. So when you are having trouble finding a document for one of the matters from your client, it’s not you. It is not your junior. It is the email system.


What are the options?


If email is the problem what is the solution?


Dropbox & other document servers: One common option is to use a document server to upload and share documents pertaining to certain matters. This is an improvement; however, it does not solve the problem. Using a document server centralizes the document storage, but then you have to manage either the document links or organize the document server for easy searching. Finding links can be as hard as finding the documents themselves. And organizing the server can solve the problem but requires a lot of work. Not only does the server have to be organized, but you have to ensure that all new documents are uploaded correctly by all that have access to the server and clean up when they do not.


Project management software: The other common option is to use project management software to manage documents. This is definitely an improvement over document servers (or an improvement using the two together). Documents can be uploaded onto individual tasks, and downloaded by others with access to the same task. These software solutions are great, but they are also very generic. And there lies the drawback of project management software. By having the software be generic, it places the onus on the users to manage and maintain standardized usage. Software admins have to make sure the right people have access to each set of tasks, and all users have to be trained on how to use the software in a standardized manner to make documents easy to find (e.g. documents can be uploaded on projects, tasks, comments or nested comments). This is why these software solutions usually require part time or full time people to maintain them and train users.


How does Amicus Work fix the problem?


Amicus Work has specifically considered the problem of easily finding documents associated with users and matters. We have tried to keep the benefits or document servers and project management software without having to deal with the drawbacks too. We do this by building specifically for legal firms - in software product parlance this is called “opinionated” software. We have built in the concept of a document into the software, and associated them with clients, lawyers and matters. From the matters, relevant documents are listed out. Searching for documents is done from a unified place, and each user's permissions already filter only the documents the user has access to. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How worried should I be about using ChatGPT and other AI tools for my legal practice?

The latest breakthroughs in AI offer unprecedented opportunities for improving efficiency across industries, and this is no less true for the legal industry. This is due to the fact that the legal practice is either carried out through highly detailed writing or transcribed into writing, and the latest AI tools have proven very adept at parsing and interpreting such text. In fact, ChatGPT can already pass law exams ( here ). Besides causing law interns across the globe to dread their future job prospects, this breakthrough can offer law firms and their clients unparalleled efficiency in writing, interpreting and communicating. Given all these benefits what could possibly be the drawbacks? And how do I avoid them? Hallucinations You have probably heard about hallucinations and seen examples of it. Famously, the Large Language Models (LLM) like ChatGPT can be tricked into saying things that aren’t true (like 2+2 = 5 here ). But they can also say inaccurate things without being prompted. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Benefits of Structuring Your Legal Workflow

Getting stuck is the phenomenon of having a question with no answer. As we go about our days, we come across questions that need answering. If we have the answer, we don’t think much about it. But when we don’t have the answer, and don’t know how to get it, then it is a problem. Software, like amicus.work , provide their value in helping you avoid or solve these problems. Here is how we can be useful in addressing those difficult to answer questions that make our workdays longer: What needs to be done and who needs to do it? In an ideal world we would all have one task, which could be completed immediately before we would need to jump onto the next one. But we do not live in an ideal world. We often have to jump between tasks and miss things in the process of doing so. Structuring your workflows can make it easy to know what needs to be done, who is assigned to do it and what other things are on your plate. This reduces down time, avoid duplicated work and saves you from taking on...
Post a Comment
Read more