Remember when matter centricity was a big thing, or when maintaining a good paper file was king and getting e-filing going was hard? This used to be a focus in firms, we’d have workshops at conferences discussing the best electronic template for files, we’d talk about getting metadata detail on documents.
It doesn’t seem a thing anymore, I’d like to think that’s because everyone has it nailed. But I suspect it’s more a broken window scenario and that the deluge of email has let “just enough” creep in.
Anyway a conversation with a colleague recently on this very topic led to me being passed a link to PowerBI Connector for iManage which looks to be a really simple tool to create dashboards to monitor say who is filing and who isn’t. Anyone use this or have other examples of tools, please add to the comments.
But I guess my more fundamental question is; Is it time to get back to basics and start to re-instil those good filing habits. Or maybe to be a bit bold and see if the old documents and email file is still valid for the DMS or whether we need a more fundamental shift in what a file now consists of? Maybe as Matter Centricity was a thing in the early 2000’s that moved us from simple tagging, we need a new shift to a more collaborative multi message approach to the file?
Thirteen years ago I was posting about the newcomer on the block (GoogleDocs) and online collaboration, looking at plugins (!!) for Word to enable better functionality for Word. But I suspect the emailing of Word documents, filling up Outlook mailboxes with Mb’s worth of attachments and picking through track changes and comments is still the way of the law firm world.
Well for those who are lucky enough to have moved to the Microsoft365 platform and have access to Word online there is a new way of sharing documents, review mode sharing.
This article sums up the details but essentially people can make suggestions (comments or track changes) or comment on other people’s suggestions without modifying the original document.
It sort of reminds me of Workshare 3 (those Legal IT historians will maybe remember this, the first expansion of Deltaview) and it’s review aspirations, it was the one item most switched off as it proved a business change too far at the time!
Let’s not even start on whether speech recognition in dictation has taken off yet!
With the proliferation of Alexa and Google devices in the home and voice assistants on your phone and in a lot of car entertainment systems it seems the idea of voice as an input method may not be dead, I’m not sure we’ll see a return to the Olympus device on every desk but…..
One article that caught my eye as a useful tip for those with Apple watches was this, Your Apple Watch Is Great for Taking Quick Voice Memos. The idea of taking down some notes or recording a conversation (with permission!) straight from the device strapped to your wrist and then having the results sync’d to your other (Apple) devices seems a great idea.
And while we’re on the topic, going back to the first point. Does anyone use the native dictation functionality within Microsoft Word to dictate their documents at all? If so let us know how it works for you in the comments!
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