Many of our clients complain of how long it takes their fee earners to create their standard precedents to versions that comply with their practices branding rules and styles. In a law firm, time really is money, so every minute spent on reworking documents is a minute less billing time!
Here is a great example of how Legal Workflow has created fantastic time saving efficiencies for one commercial law firm client, that must also be relevant to so many law firms faced with the challenges of converting their PLC sourced documents into their own house style.
Our client had built up a considerable bank of legal precedents, mainly sourced through their PLC subscription. The problem was many of these were well over 50 pages long and some even over a 100; it was a truly laborious and a very time consuming job to get them converted to comply with their own branding, styling and numbering convention, typically taking at least an hour and a half and sometimes many hours depending on the original state of the document.
How could we help improve on this?
So, working through the firm’s Styles Guideline Documentation we created a tailored Word template, with a customised ribbon, incorporating all of their house styles and ensuring their preferred paragraph numbering structures were adhered to. Users can apply these styles easily via dedicated buttons on their customised ribbon. The template is also locked down so that users cannot change the approved styles, add their own, or mess up the numbering mechanism.
Then there was SuperPaste!
SuperPaste is an Add-in to Word, that allows users to bring existing content into a new document template, efficiently and safely. It automatically reformats content on the fly, using only the firm’s approved styles from the target template. The SuperPaste tool also allows users to paste the content from non-Word, text only sources such as emails, PDFs or databases, even reformatting this type of content, integrating it into the automatic paragraph numbering mechanism. The results were amazing. Those 1 hour 30-minute processing times for documents were down to just 10 minutes and with a greater amount of consistency throughout the converted documents.
Given how many law firms are using PLC and similar repositories, are you one of those we could assist to save your practice time – and money? We have a great Case Study on the way – let me know if you’d like a copy:
Paul Clyde / Commercial Director
paulclyde@legalworkflow.com / M: 07863 299 491
To keep up to date with what we’re doing with legal technology, why not sign up to our technology bulletin, Legal Workflow Decoded, here.
