How to take advantage of legal search tools

Save time and work smart

Time and convenience are two of the hottest commodities in legal practice and improving your searches can make you the master of both of these.

We are in an age where everything is becoming digital so it's increasingly important that you're able to use your time well and provide convenient solutions to tasks. One of the greatest forms of waste is spending hours searching for matter-related documents and information. If your firm has thousands of documents in boxes, no matter how well they're stored, it's still going to take you a while to find them, especially if you're operating by yourself or in a small team.

With a system like that, you're wasting your time on inefficient searching that really should be focused on matters and providing your clients with top service. Your billable hours are running away as you try to find what you need before you can record them. This can result in later nights as you struggle to make up for the time you spent searching through files. At the end of the day this ends up being a poor outcome for both you and your clients. How do you solve the problem? 

Centralise your information

With a matter management system like mattero, you'll have everything from the one centralised web-based platform. Any correspondence, documentation, or data will be readily available for you to search with our powerful search tools as well as integration with Infotrack. Not only will your data be logged against the corresponding matter, but it will be filed directly with the time you've spent working on it. This will help you keep track of the work you've done on your matters and ensure there's no overlap. 

Store your documents and data correctly

When it comes to taking advantage of legal search, it's imperative that you store your documents and data correctly. It's simple, once they're organised, your documents are easy to find. 

Searching for documents is as much a part of being a lawyer as preparing briefs, going to mediations or arguing in the courts. Even as we move more towards paperless offices, wading through unrelated clutter and irrelevant items continues to be a major issue. Whether that comes in the form of physically sorting through your documents or trawling the depths of your computer's folders for that one contract, piece of correspondence, or notable matter, it works out to be a colossal waste of time. 

While it may seem dramatic at first, you'd be astounded if you knew just how much time you spend looking for things on the job. According to the experts, it's roughly 19% of the total time in a work week. That's a massive amount of time to be wasting. Not only is it annoying, it's also cutting into the number of billable hours you can perform for your clients, effectively slashing your productive working time by a fifth.

Save yourself time

These facts alone should more than convince you that you need to get a handle on your searching. Programs which help you master your searches or esigning are a huge help for people in a variety of fields but especially law. As already mentioned, cutting down on the time you waste searching your files and correspondence allows you to spend more time on the things that matter.

But it's about more than just saving you time searching through your own documents and data. If you have a software that integrates with other powerful search tools like Infotrack, you can gain even greater efficiency. mattero's integration with Infotrack is two way which means you can order your searches through mattero and they will then be stored against the corresponding matter. This means there's no going back and forth or accidentally losing them, the search takes no time and is then stored exactly where it should be.

Ensure data is correct and up to date