DMS for Law Firms

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According to the American Bar Association, 86% of all private practice lawyers in the United States work in firms of 100 or fewer attorneys. Our discussions with solo practitioners and small to medium-sized firm lawyers have confirmed two key points:

• Lawyers have a unique appreciation for the need to keep track of documents and the need to keep even electronic versions of documents in a safe, secure place.
  
• Lawyers in small to medium-sized firms, as well as solo practitioners, rarely have the time or the resources to invest in highly technical, costly document management systems designed primarily for "mega" firms.

Whether you are running your own solo practice, or helping to manage a medium-sized firm, one subject that keeps you up at night is the documents on your computers. Consider these scenarios:

• A junior lawyer in your firm makes key changes to a heavily negotiated agreement, the only copy of which is on his laptop. He then leaves the office with his laptop, is called away for a family emergency and cannot be located when the client unexpectedly calls looking for the revised document. With DMS, a senior lawyer would have full access to the document.
  
• You are overseeing a group of five lawyers working on a critically important brief in support of a motion to dismiss. Each lawyer has a different version of the brief on his or her laptop and it is impossible to tell who made the most recent changes. DMS automatically creates new versions of documents and keeps a history of who made changes when.
  
• Arriving at your hotel on a well-deserved vacation from your busy solo practice, you receive a message from your paralegal. Your largest client, the mortgage department of a local bank, has just determined that its standard form of Promissory Note must be changed to comply with a new state regulation and is insisting that you make the change. You have not brought your computer with you and cannot rely on the security of the hotel's e-mail account. If the hotel has a computer with an Internet connection, you can access and revise the document securely without e-mail. Once revised, your paralegal can access the new document from the secure DMS server where it is stored.

Very large law firms have dealt with these types of issues for years using expensive document management systems that usually require equipment purchases, dedicated staff and high software license fees. DMS solves those same problems in a way that works for the 86% of practitioners who do not work in very large firms. The DMS team has packed virtually all the functionality of big firm systems, as well as world-class storage and security, into an intuitive service that you can begin to use immediately.