Going Paperless – The options and what to keep in mind when preparing an eBrief
Going paperless (or maybe paper light) is something that has been a focus for many law firms who have been working toward the goal of a paperless practice for some time. For others, a paperless environment may have been somewhat forced upon them thanks to the COVID19 pandemic that has upended so much about our lives in 2020. Either way, there are no doubt many adjustments that have had to be made in your practice and electronic briefing of counsel is likely to be one of them.
There are plenty of benefits when it comes to briefing counsel electronically including:
24 hour access from any location
Missing documentation or errors can easily be addressed
Brief can easily be shared with other barristers/lawyers
A properly organised electronic brief can be a lot more effective than a hard-copy brief, and can be delivered and updated a lot quicker without the need to resort to sending documents by email or by traditional hardcopy delivery methods.
Brief documents can be made searchable through OCR (optical character recognition) and can be easily bookmarked, indexed and bates numbering can be applied
So what options are available to you when briefing counsel electronically and what should you keep in mind when doing so?
The Options
There are a number of options available to you to assist in preparing electronic briefs including:
1. Using a cloud-storage platform to organise your brief into a series of folders and sending a link. Options include Dropbox, OneDrive, GoogleDrive, which are all platforms for storing, sharing and collaboratively drafting documents. If you’re using Office 365 for Business or gSuite then you should already have access to OneDrive for Business or GoogleDrive as part of your subscription.
2. Bundledocs provides a simple way to create electronic briefs and bundles, organising documents into a neat, numbered, indexed and sectioned booklet that can be instantly ready to save, share or print. Bundledocs also integrates with various document storage solutions including Actionstep, Clio, OneDrive, Dropbox and GoogleDrive.
3. E-Brief Ready is a comprehensive solution that enables a safe and easy electronic circulation of briefs and the documents associated with legal proceedings. a 100% paperless, secure and instant system for solicitors to instruct barristers. eBrief Ready can be used to Share briefs instantly, collaborate in real-time, automate court books and briefs, smart search thousands of pages, tag and annotate the most important information and stay paperless and protect the environment.
https://www.ebriefready.com.au
4. Adobe Pro DC enables you to create bookmarked and hyperlinked bundles. Perhaps best suited to smaller briefs, it’s simple to use Adobe tools such as “Create PDF”, “Combine Files”, “Organise Pages” and “Scan and OCR” to create a well organised brief.
Points to keep in mind
OCR Recognition
An electronic brief is usually, if not always, compiled using documents in PDF format (which stands for Portable Document Format). PDF is a universal file format that preserves the fonts, images, graphics and layout of any source document regardless of the application and platform used to create it.
Unless your PDF documents have been converted from word format, it’s unlikely that they will be text searchable, but you can check this by running a quick test. To do this, select either ‘edit and search’ or using the keyboard hold down the ‘control’ and ‘f’ key (or for mac users, ‘command’ and ‘f’) and then search for a word you know exists within the document. If you get to the end of the document without the word being found or a box pops up telling you that Adobe has finished searching and no results were found, your document is not text searchable but an image.
Some applications enable you to convert an image PDF to a text searchable PDF by running OCR Text Recognition over the document. One such example is Adobe Pro. Acrobat can easily turn non-searchable documents into editable PDFs. Simply open the “Scan and OCR” tool and run the “recognise text” function. Also, when you open a scanned document for editing, Acrobat will automatically run the OCR tool in the background.
Organised
An eBrief should be just as organised as a hard copy version would be. This means that the brief should be properly indexed and preferably hyperlinked to each individual document. Documents should be saved in a sensible and consistent manner, ideally using an easily understood and consistent naming convention, for example each file name starting with the date of the document YYYY-MM-DD followed by a description of the document (e.g. 2020.09.01 Affidavit of Joe Bloggs or 2020.09.01 Letter to Opposing Solicitor re supervised access) and should be bookmarked.
Hopefully this post has provided some food for thought when looking into options to go paperless in providing briefs to counsel. Approaching the acceleration of technology in legal practice with an open mind can result in a time saving, increased efficiencies and is much kinder on our environment.