LITERA INTRODUCES ANONYMIZE FOR CLAUSE COMPANION, ALLOWING LAWYERS TO SAFELY REUSE THEIR PREFERRED WORK

February 5, 2020 – Today, Litera introduced Clause Companion’s newest feature, Anonymize. The solution’s new save and anonymize workflow allows lawyers to reuse content from their prior work to safely create new documents faster.

“Clause Companion is a necessity at our firm,” a CIO with a Global 100 firm said. “It is easy, fast, and changes the game for lawyers. Not only does it empower them to provide practical guidance on how to use preferred phrases and content, but the new “Anonymize” function provides a flexible solution for document creation. Now, all lawyers — not just transactional folks — can save, reuse, and leverage their best content without needing to be a document expert or interrupting their workflow.”

Clause Companion’s Anonymize feature offers users several benefits:

  • Automatically anonymizes content by detecting and replacing deal-specific data with the choice of blanks, symbols, or variables
  • Anonymized documents can be saved to the Clause Companion library as easily accessible, ready-to-go templates
  • Allows lawyers to safely reuse these documents and their preferred content faster, without ever leaving Microsoft Word

“Lawyers often use the fastest process to draft high-quality documents – by starting from an existing document that they’re familiar with,” Avaneesh Marwaha, CEO of Litera, said. “Sorting through content libraries to identify the best, most current documents and replacing the critical details in them takes substantial time that could be better spent on higher-value tasks. Anonymize helps lawyers by making this process smarter, faster, and more secure.”

Learn more by watching our video on Clause Companion.

About Litera
Litera is the leading provider of software for managing transactions and drafting, proofreading, comparing, repairing, cleaning, and securing documents in legal and corporate industries worldwide. Our core products empower users to generate, review, and distribute high-quality content quickly and securely, from any device. Today, Litera supports thousands of document-intensive organizations across the globe, helping them satisfy the complex demands of clients and regulators.

/by Litera

According to the “12th Annual Law Department Operations Survey,” released last month, business process improvement is the leading current and expected challenge for corporate legal departments, followed closely by the need to stay abreast of law department technology.

The survey produced by the Blickstein Group is created via an advisory board consisting of law department operations professionals from Fortune 500 companies and other consultants.

The good news from the report is that more corporate legal professionals (70.2%) are reporting that they have the right technology to do their jobs than in the previous survey (68.6%). And more specifically, 57.4% said they had plans to update, evaluate, or implement a document management system (DMS) in the next 12 months to extend that upswing.

However, on a scale of 1 to 10, respondents ranked the effectiveness of DMS technology in general at a 6.7—well behind the 7.1 average score for all legal information technologies. While up from a 5.9 in the previous year’s survey, the 2019 report lists a few reasons for this perceived lack of effectiveness, notedly insufficient training, poor implementation, and underuse.

Here are 3 ways law departments can overcome these and other challenges with DMS and improve their business processes:

Enable better search in a DMS

It’s clear from the low effectiveness scores for DMS technology that traditional products aren’t meeting the needs of contemporary legal departments. One way that this can be improved is to enable better search in your DMS.

Users need to more effectively save and search a large volume of documents, emails, and messages that flow through the legal department. Modern DMS offers suggested filing locations and personalized search that delivers more accurate results by remembering what you search for most often.

While 47.4% of survey respondents indicated they don’t use Artificial Intelligence in their legal departments, this technology is ripe for improving DMS effectiveness. By enabling improved user document search and even extraction of specific datasets buried in documents with AI, legal departments can significantly improve their business processes. Nearly 27% of survey respondents indicated they’re using AI for e-discovery or document review, while 13% indicated they’re using it for insight or predictions.

Offer a better DMS experience to users and the organization

As suggested in the survey, DMS effectiveness often is hindered by underuse. One strategy to overcome this challenge is to offer legal departments a more consumer-like experience with these technologies. Modern DMS empowers professionals to work more productively while enabling legal departments to be more efficient, agile, and responsive to the changing business environment.

It does so by mirroring consumer applications like Amazon and Google, with intuitive features that work the way users want to work on any device, while requiring minimal training. It anticipates user actions, and integrates with other tools that legal professionals use, such as matter management, conflict management, and workflow software.

Further, a modern DMS offers benefits at the organization level, with cloud delivery models to enhance organizational agility with rapid deployment, automated updates, and the flexibility to add new functionality as needed.

Offer comprehensive security in a DMS

Legal organizations have unique requirements for securing documents for all their different clients. This only becomes more complex when they must also meet the various legal requirements for all the countries in which they do business. So, it’s no surprise that handling global issues ranked 6th in top challenges legal departments face according to the survey, while compliance issues and data protection came in 9th.

Modern DMS delivers comprehensive security, built on established industry best practices, to protect information assets. These protections are augmented by comprehensive governance, security, and risk mitigation features including need-to-know security and ethical walls, to govern information access.

Learn more about how a modern DMS can help your legal department improve its business processes here.

/by Clint Crosier

Mutual Mobile is very proud to attend Legal Week for the first time and introduce ourselves to the legal tech community. 

John Paul Sommer is the Vice President of XR (Extended Reality) at Mutual Mobile.  Throughout his career, he has held leadership positions at elite game companies like EA, Zynga, Midway, and Microsoft. His extensive background in visual design and interactive software development spans over twenty five years, incorporating many different platforms including PC, Console, Mobile, and now XR. 

Over the last several years, John has co-founded a VR Entertainment Company, as well as designed and produced over 20 XR experiences for some of the world’s largest brands like Walmart, Nestle, Toyota, Salesforce, Lockheed Martin, and Royal Caribbean. John plays a key role at Mutual Mobile in driving successful business development for emerging XR technologies.

John will be delivering 20-min lightning talks on Wednesday in LITE theatre on the 2nd level right outside of Rhinelander Hall. 

Trial Prep in VR: Help reduce fear and anxiety to perform confidently under pressure.  

Wednesday, 1:30 pm

 

/by Mutual Mobile

The legal industry is defined by precision with each move made by law firms and legal professionals determined by well-defined rules of engagement. It is meticulously documented by an army of paralegals and legal assistants and as a result, law firms are buried under a veritable mountain of paperwork.
Tarter Krinsky & Drogin, the mid-size law firm based in New York increased productivity and efficiency, saved significantly on storage costs and reduced the pressure on the company’s IT team from adopting ScanSnap with Worldox solution.

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LawPay is essential to the Smith & Vinson Law Firm

BACKGROUND

The Smith & Vinson Law Firm is a criminal defense firm founded in Austin, Texas in 2016. They are 100 percent focused on criminal defense, representing individuals in cases involving DWI, domestic violence, assault, sex crimes, weapons charges, and other criminal justice matters. “Our mission is to do everything possible to help the client out,” said Brad Vinson, one of the founding partners at Smith & Vinson. “We want you to know that we’re here to fight for you, no matter what.”

ONLINE PAYMENTS FROM DAY ONE

Smith & Vinson knew from the very beginning that they wanted to accept online payments in their firm. For Jarrod Smith, founding partner at Smith & Vinson, LawPay was his first choice. “We actually started with LawPay. It was recommended by our state bar, and by other lawyers, as the best payment processor.” Brad Vinson did some research on online payment processors, but after reviewing several options that were available, the answer was clear. “We talked to our bank and a couple other banks about the services they offered. No one really compared to what LawPay was putting on the table.”

While the firm still accepts other forms of payments, LawPay’s online payments solution quickly became their clients’ preferred way to pay. Brad Vinson said that “probably 80 percent of the transactions that clients make with us come from LawPay.” Jarrod Smith concurred, “our clients love LawPay!”

PAYMENT FLEXIBILITY 

Smith & Vinson appreciated how LawPay allowed them to get a payment request out the door as soon as one came up. “In criminal defense, clients often want to pay you outside of their payment schedule,” said Brad Vinson. “We have requests at any given moment for a payment, and we want to be able to send one right away.” 

Jarrod Smith particularly liked how LawPay’s Quick Bill feature streamlined Smith & Vinson’s practice. “Quick Bill has been essential. It has made our practice more efficient, and it saves us time and money by being able to send out payments so quickly.”

KEEPING TRACK OF PAYMENTS

Another standout LawPay feature for Smith & Vinson is its robust reporting system. “Being able to quickly go in and see on a month-to-month basis how much money is coming in through LawPay is something we really like,” said Brad Vinson. “Also, being able to see more specific criteria, like picking a date range and seeing how much income had come in during that time period. We really like it.” Jarrod Smith echoed his partner’s praise of LawPay’s reporting features. “They allow me and my legal assistant to quickly see who has paid and who hasn’t.” In all, Smith & Vinson feel they couldn’t have made a better choice by going with LawPay. As Brad Vinson put it, “between the speed of doing a transaction, the fees associated with them, the ease of use—we felt comfortable that LawPay was the way to go.”

 

/by Amy Mann