In legal practice, documents arise not just in the course of administrative work. In fact, documents constitute the raw materials and finished products in this case. You prepare your legal arguments on the basis of documents – evidence and case law. The finished products constitute court judgments, put on paper (or computer). Managing all these documents is of critical importance in law practice.

Classes of Documents

We can see three main categories of documents in a legal office:

• Litigation Documents: Documents that is unique to a particular litigation, such as evidentiary documents, depositions, arguments, judgments and so on.
• Litigation Support Documents: These constitute the documents such as the law library that is available for supporting all litigation work.
• Administrative Documents: Work assignment sheets, payroll, invoices, supplier bills, accounts, general correspondence and so on.

It is better to manage each of these categories of documents separately.

Litigation Documents

If a particular law suit involves a great deal of documents, you can store them on a laptop and carry them around with you. You can then easily refer to these while holding discussions with your clients, or presenting your arguments before the court. You can store the documents in a folder that identifies which case the documents refer to.

If a case involves very few documents, it might not be worthwhile to transfer these to the computer, however. Periodically, you should also move the folders of finished cases to an archive at your office computer. That way, the clutter on your laptop can be cleared, and space released to store new cases.

Litigation Support Documents

You can store whole law libraries on your computer. Readymade packages containing such libraries are available in the market. You can also purchase updates so that your library is always current.

When such a library is available, you can look up relevant decisions and case law much more effectively, using the search facility that comes with these packages. If the library is stored on your laptop, you can refer to it wherever you carry the laptop. Even if the library is on the office computer, you can access it from anywhere with an Internet connection.

Administrative Documents

Administrative documents will consist of transaction documents such as time sheets and current payroll, general documents such as correspondence with your landlord and archives of non-current documents that might be needed for future reference.

Managing these documents follow the standard document management practices. Packages such as payroll, billing and accounting are used to speed up transactions and ensure that errors and omissions are minimized. Correspondence and other general documents are stored under meaningfully labeled computer folders. Archives are optimized for querying.

Billing systems are of particular value to lawyers. Time worked on cases can be recorded in an automated fashion as you work on each case. You can also record times you spent offline on a case.

Billing can occur weeks after the work and by marking off billed times, you can keep track of times yet to be billed. A billing system can even alert you about these.

Legal document management can thus help you in several areas of your practice.