Before we all moved to working from home, were your attorneys and paralegals approving pre-bills by marking up paper? And now? Are you scanning reams of paper? Printing and FedEx-ing?
In late 2018 we were contacted by the head of Knowledge Management of an AmLaw 100 law firm. They had a specific goal: to make approval of pre-bills paperless and easy to do on an iPad. They have a practice which has high monthly transactions. Some partners were approving several thousand pre-bills per month on paper. This was difficult enough when a partner was in the office. It was untenable if the partner had to travel. This firm had heard about our LINK app’s built-in annotation and integration with DMS. They wanted to know if we could help.
Marking up pre-bills is easy to do with LINK. Here is a common workflow:
- Accounting uploads the pre-bills to a folder in DMS.
- Attorney goes to that folder in DMS from the LINK app.
- Attorney annotates the pre-bills using LINK’s in-app annotation.
- Attorney saves the marked-up pre-bill to DMS from the LINK app.
- Accounting retrieves the marked-up pre-bills.
That’s all there is to it. In LINK you can mark-up a pre-bill with a pencil or a finger. Add a stamp or note. You can even capture your signature then place it on documents.
This law firm started approving pre-bills with LINK in 2019. Their partners are very pleased with the improved process. There is no going back to paper for them.
There are variations to the workflow. Instead of DMS the firm may upload the pre-bills to network file shares or OneDrive. Or, the pre-bills may be emailed to the attorney, marked up in LINK, and then emailed back. LINK can be used on a phone instead of a tablet.
You may watch a video showing two workflows, one using DMS and one using email, below.
in legal we are seeing that this pandemic presents an opportunity for certain productivity improvements. Not only in the case of Zoom, but usage of DocuSign has rocketed. “Never let a crisis go to waste.”
We would be happy to discuss your pre-bill workflow and how LINK could apply to it.
-Maureen
contact@mobilehelix.com +1 347-508-0967
LINK App: Paperless Legal Pre-bill Approval Workflows 8:54 from LINK App by Mobile Helix on Vimeo.
