Cutting through the pink tape

The Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) Keir Starmer has recently said that from April 2012 the Courts will go digital with judges, lawyers and juries having to handle all evidence on screens. For the CPS, the paper file relied upon by lawyers since the days of the Quill pen will be a thing of the past.   

 

Twenty years ago no real alternative to a paper file existed. It was a necessity, it was heavy (its weight often used to gauge its cost), cumbersome, could only be handled by one person at a time, got lost easily/frequently and when it was found, more time was wasted thumbing through its hundreds of pages. 

What about the creation of correspondence within the paper file? Law firms still have secretaries producing letters from a previous letter, cutting and pasting contact and address details, amending paragraphs and then printing and saving to a local ‘My Documents’ folder. This not only is yet more time wasted, but does not deal with the dangers of metadata.

The paper file is a ‘waste of time’ every single time it’s referred to!

So what about the electronic file? To start with, it is everything a paper file is not and with the advent of Cloud computing, it can be accessed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, from any location by any number of people all at the same time.

An easy to use and successfully implemented document management system such as Norwel Prescient can make a real difference to how a business not just manages its correspondence, but how they are produced.

Document bundles are extremely time consuming to compile and collate. Printing multiple copies of documents, photocopying, laying them out over desks, sorting and stacking is costly, bad for the environment and has a far greater margin of error than an electronic production.

Document bundling and document management software reduces the time taken in producing a bundle from hours to just minutes. What’s more, once the electronic bundle has been sent it’s a simple step to provide an amendment if necessary.

 

If you want to save hours of staff time, increase accuracy and reduce the risk in producing bundles, then give Norwel a call and find out how Norwel bundling can help.