When preparing legal documents, lawyers often need to retrieve information from disparate line-of-business systems like document management, contacts, and legal research systems. They then navigate among these systems to collect information that is to be consolidated. As a result, these highly paid legal professionals might spend hours searching for the information they need, often without finding the recently updated content.

Also, searching and consolidating information manually is a difficult and time consuming task. It may also lead to some error. This is where a document assembly solution comes to the rescue. A document assembly system can improve productivity and reduce errors by enabling, streamlining document assembly, and optimizing content capture processes. Document assembly systems also facilitate content reuse. This is because document assembly systems possess tools that create smart precedents, clause libraries, and packages of documents which the law firms can share and re-use whenever the need arises.

For example, lawyers delegate some of their drafting work to the junior staff. This helps them concentrate on the case better and deliver fast and effective results to their clients. However, if the juniors are inexperienced, senior lawyers still lose valuable time answering basic questions, reviewing drafts, and doing corrections. This is where document assembly helps. A document assembly system helps you consolidate all the legal information in one place and a junior can refer to it at the time of need, instead of asking his senior.

With the aid of document assembly system, a legal organization can also improve the quality of deliverables and broaden the scope of content available for reuse.

Some of the other benefits offered by document assembly system are as follows:

* It offers easier access to content.
* It increases worker productivity.
* It helps in incorporating current and reliable content from existing systems and improves the quality of deliverables.
* It features advanced formatting tools that helps in saving time.
* Streamlined processes for content review and posting reduce administrative overhead costs.
* It facilitates compliance with changing legal standards.

So, if you are an owner of a law firm and you wish to increase the productivity of your workers and reduce your overhead costs, you can opt for the document assembly system. OMNIpub is an Enterprise Document Assembly system offered either as a service or licensed for your company.

1. Companies spend $20 in labor to file a document, $120 in labor to find a misfiled document, and $220 in labor to reproduce a lost document.
2. 7.5 percent of all documents get lost; 3 percent of the remainder get misfiled.
3. Professionals spend 5 – 15 percent of their time reading information, but up to 50 percent looking for it.
4. The average document photocopied 19 times.
5. There are over 4 trillion paper documents in the U.S. alone and they are growing at a rate of 22% per year (PricewaterhouseCoopers).
6. Corporate users received an average of 18 megabytes (MB) of e-mail per day in 2007; E-mail is expected to grow to over 28 MB per day by 2011.
7. Users send and receive an average of 133 e-mail messages per day (Radicati Group).
8. A single FAX machine costs $6,200 per year (Captaris); the average time to manually FAX a document is 8 minutes.
9. The average cost to send a package via courier service is between $8 and $15.
10. The cost of office space has increased 19% (Office Space Across the World 2008).

We look forward to your comments and feedback.

Regards,
Eugene Fallon
Fallon Consultants, Ltd.
www.fallonconsultants.com