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Scott Benton: Hey everyone, Scott Benton here, how are you? I’m the host of the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast where we help you easily transition from a law school student into your professional career as an attorney and where we make the practice of law fun. And today we’re going to look at tools for document organization and research.
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Scott Benton: Today in order to help assist your overall use of the success cycle, we’re going to look at tools for document organization and research. Every person who has a craft that they work on also has a toolbox and a whole set of tools for that particular craft. And attorneys are no different. When you join a law firm, in a sense, you’re joining a legal toolbox that’s going to provide an entire range of tools for you to utilize to deliver your legal services with.
In fact, law firms are largely in the business of leveraging the technology they bring into the firm in order to help organize and streamline workflows and improve the legal services that they provide to their clients.
As technology progresses at a lightning fast pace, those technologies are upgraded or they’re added to on a regular [00:02:00] basis, which means that it’s your job to stay on top of all of those frequent changes. Now, although we won’t be able to cover all the tools or all of the brands, and, for instance, compare legal research databases such as CEB versus Westlaw versus LexisNexis, And so on, we’re still going to take a look at what you’re typically going to be working with in a law firm that will help you get your job done faster, better, and more efficiently when it comes to managing documents, conducting research, and engaging in communication.
Now the role of technology in a modern legal practice is simply to increase productivity through automation. As many filings, forms, and processes are largely done through repetition with the names and the dates changed. You can use technology to help automate what are often time consuming tasks.
Technology also allows for seamless collaboration between attorneys, clients, and paralegals, which improves workflow and [00:03:00] communication.
Now this is largely accomplished with cloud based tools on digital platforms. If there’s more than one person on a legal team working on a single document together through shared online workspaces, that work can be done collectively as a way to speed up the time that it takes to finish a filing When it comes to document management, in general, the law firm that you work for will have a centralized cloud based document storage system that’s going to secure, store, organize, and share legal documents, and it’s the absolute lifeblood of the firm. These document management systems, such as a cloud based centralized drive, are also going to deliver better document version control.
That means that you’re going to know if you’re working on the latest version of a document or not. And that’s important because nothing’s going to waste more of your time than if you’re working on an outdated document. Within the document management system, generally there’s going to be a specific folder structure in place for all [00:04:00] of the cases that you’re working on that are going to be consistent from one case to another, which is important.
Now this not only creates uniformity from case to case to case when organizing the cases, but it also makes documents really easy to find.
On top of a consistent uniform folder system to organize the documents in a case folder. There’s also going to be naming conventions when it comes to naming each single document. That’s also important to remain consistent. When you first start working as an attorney at a firm, not only do you want to learn how to folder structure works, but you very much want to also be clear on how the naming conventions work so you don’t step outside of those guidelines.
If so, you make it difficult for you and for other attorneys and staff members to quickly find the documents that you need them to work on. Also I want to quickly touch on tagging and metadata with the documents that you create in order to help with producing better search results. So whatever the naming conventions are, you can always [00:05:00] include additional information in the metadata by tagging your documents with keywords that are going to be important to the case file or the client.
Maybe the type of document it is, or perhaps there’s special circumstances to the case that you want to include. Make sure you include anything at all that you think will help current and future attorneys and staff members quickly find that information with a simple search. Another tool that you’re going to use is a digital legal research platform.
Now, each law firm is going to have at least one of these digital platforms, such as Nexus Lexis, or Westlaw, or maybe CEB, or another platform where you can look up case law, or statutes, and legal precedents. The nice thing, of course, about these platforms is that they’re updated all the time when the laws change or when new information becomes available that affects the information contained on these platforms.
These digital legal research platforms streamline your legal research and quickly find information that you need to put your documents, [00:06:00] petitions, or discovery findings together. Now, AI has also become more and more prominent to quickly analyze large volumes of data and help attorneys find relevant cases for legal insight.
But each law firm is going to have its own policies on using AI as a tool for rendering legal findings and documents. So you want to check with your supervising attorney when it comes to the use of AI with regards to legal work. In general, whenever AI is used, it’s used to compliment rather than replace human judgment.
As this technology changes and updates its abilities rapidly, what you know today can become outdated quickly. So this is an area that you most likely need to pay very close attention to as time goes on. As you can see, beginning a new job as an attorney at a law firm means you’ve got a lot on your plate to learn and master to get up to speed so you become a productive component and a revenue generator for that law [00:07:00] firm. The tools we’ve discussed here are just a few of many that you’re going to encounter, and the tools are largely going to be different from firm to firm.
And there’s all of these technologies, these platforms and tools change frequently. You want to adapt continuously and integrate whatever new technologies are embraced and implemented in your firm. to help improve the workflow efficiency and the quality of the legal services that are delivered to the clients that you’re working with.
Upgrading your skill sets with new technologies as they come along will be a normal part of your work routine as an attorney in order to make sure that you don’t fall behind. I’m Scott Benton. I’m the host of the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast. Thank you so much for joining us on this episode. Now if you like this podcast and you’d like to get more information about us, you can always go to our website at classroom2courtroom. com. That’s classroom, the number two. courtroom. com or you can send us a message to keep in touch with us. You can even inquire about our [00:08:00] seasonal associate programs we have available for law school students.
You can apply to come and work with us. And as always, don’t forget to like share and subscribe to stay on top of all of our latest episodes. And until next time, we hope you’ll join us in making the world a better place. One client at a time.
