4 Tips to scanning documents efficiently for your law firm
Working in a law firm can be quite rewarding but does require a great deal of organization to keep documents in order. It is imperative to organize documents so that a lawyer can keep their notes and legally binding documents easily accessible for the sake of efficiency.
One of the ways that you can organize your documents is by keeping them online. While many industries have gone to doing business electronically, the legal field has yet to follow suit. The reason for this is that there are many paper forms that are imperative to the legal process.
The best way to get documents into a secure and online format is by using Document Scanning services. This article will highlight some of the best tips to scanning your documents in an efficient and safe manner.
Hire an outside vendor to conduct your scanning for you. Believe it or not, it may actually cost you more money to hire a staff member to scan all of your documents for you than it would be to hire an outside vendor. Document professionals can offer a large machine to scan documents and upload them in a matter of minutes. This can save you a great deal of time and money when you are working on a case.
Make sure to scan the documents into the correct format. You can spend time scanning your documents to be able to access them quickly from a tablet or a computer but if you do not use the proper document format, your efforts could be for not. PDF and TIFF file formats are most often preferred.
Add a bates number for easy searching. If you are like most lawyers, you will likely have thousands of pages of paper per case that you are dealing with at any given time. This means that it can be quite a challenge to find information that is important to your case when you are accessing your documents. One of the ways that you can mitigate this problem is to ask that a bates number be added to your documents while they are being scanned. A bates number will allow you to quickly find the information that you need by page number.
Optical Character Recognition should be employed during the scanning process. The reason for this is that the OCR process can help to identify symbols, specific words or phrases, and numbers that can be easily identified by searching for them. When you are in the middle of a case or you are searching for a fact while working on the case, using OCR can save a great deal of time as it will allow you to search for a phrase, timeframe, or even author.
As you can see, there are many perks to having your legal documents scanned. While not mentioned in the article, you are able to get your documents scanned onto a disk that can then be sent via mail for much less than it would be to courier a stack of papers. Saving money and time is a great reason to consider scanning your documents efficiently if you run a law firm.
