The Ultimate Solution for Reducing Stress and Increasing Retention in Law Firms 

Attracting and retaining high-calibre talent has become increasingly challenging across industries. There are many factors that can be attributed to this however long working hours, the volume of work that needs to be completed and high-pressure situations are some of the factors behind talent leaving the legal profession. Having a work/life balance is one of the top areas that lawyers see as being more important now than before while studies show that legal employees report that they spend between 1-10 hours overtime per week due to last-minute document changes and time-consuming processes. 

Within the legal industry, it is becoming more common for employees to experience burnout. It has been reported that it is no longer uncommon for lawyers to be on sick pay from six months up to a year due to burnout. There are many negative effects that burnout can have on a firm such as reduced efficiency and inattention to detail, which can have severe consequences for management and client relationships.  

By adopting and utilising technologies, you can ensure that your firm adopts an approach that facilitates the needs of your employees leading to a reduction in stress and an increase in retention.  

 
The Solution 

Automating tedious and time-intensive work is considered by legal practitioners to be the most effective way that technology can help. There are many ways in which technology can be utilised within a firm from case management systems to our own e-bundling and PDF solution.  


Improved Communication  

Utilising technology ensures that your employees can communicate with each other from any place at any time, allowing them to collaborate on cases whether they are in the office or working remotely. Our cloud-based document bundling platform allows users to seamlessly create, collaborate and share documents from anywhere in the world. Built to streamline time-intensive tasks, our solution is compliant and secure.  



Increased Flexibility 

With the Bundledocs core solution and PDF Editor, users can easily manipulate, OCR, annotate, create and share PDF documents, along with the added functionality of text editing. What once was a deeply painstaking task, can now be completed in a matter of moments, saving firms countless hours and ensuring that their teams can focus on other tasks. 

“The Transformation from time-intensive manual process to now automated and cloud-based document bundling with less hang ups and errors has been amazing

”
— Jeanine Wilson, Real Estate & Coporate Clerk, Soloway Wright LLP.


Remain Competitive  

When it comes to attracting high-calibre talent and ensuring they do not succumb to burnout throughout the duration of their contract, technology can play a role. Many law firms continue to execute workflows manually, with no assistance from automated tools. By adopting new solutions, you will stand out from your competition in terms of efficiency and productivity, allowing employees to benefit from a better work-life balance.  

Embracing technology within your firm will enable you to stay ahead of the competition by ensuring that you stand out from the crowd when it comes to the employee experience. 

Reducing stress and increasing retention is crucial for retaining high-calibre talent. Burnout can lead to negative consequences for both individuals and firms, making it essential to find solutions that streamline tedious and time-intensive tasks. 

Start streamlining time-intensive tasks and reduce stress amongst your legal team by contacting a member of our support team today.  

 

E-Bundle Creation for the Family Division

Due to the rise of remote hearings throughout the pandemic, there was an increase in the usage of electronic bundles during family court cases. Recently there have been some changes to the practice directions that had previously been set out by the President of the Family Division’s Guidance for use in the Family Court and Family Division.

There is no doubt that electronic bundles are the way forward. As courts and firms alike make the move away from paper bundles, the practice directions on electronic bundle creation and delivery are continually evolving and changing.

For those that regularly submit e-bundles to court, it is important to keep up to date with the latest requirements to ensure your bundles are fully compliant with the latest practice directions. Our solution is fully compliant with the updated practice directions, as well as all previous directions. We’ve even created pre-set templates to make it easier for you to create court-compliant e-bundles using Bundledocs.

Let’s look at some of the key requirements from the latest update:

Bookmarks

All significant documents and all sections in bundles must be bookmarked for ease of navigation, with a short description as the bookmark.

Late Inserts

If additions are to be made to an e-bundle after it has been transmitted to the judge, then new pages should be added at the end of the bundle (and paginated accordingly). An enquiry should be made of the court as to the best way of providing the additional material. Subject to any different direction, the judge should be provided with both (a) the new section and, separately, (b) the revised bundle. This is necessary as the judge may have already marked up the original bundle.

Bundle Limit

An e-bundle may only exceed the default limit of 350 pages provided by PD 27A para 5.1 with the court’s permission.

Chronological Order

The documents in the bundle shall be arranged in chronological order from the front of the bundle, paginated individually and consecutively (starting with page 1 and using Arabic numbering throughout), indexed and divided into separate sections with each section being separately paginated.

Landscape Pages

Any page that has been created in landscape orientation should appear in that orientation so that it can be read from left to right. No page should appear upside down within an e-bundle.

Mark Key Documents with an Asterix

Rather than producing a core e-bundle a better method for identifying key documents is to mark them in the index with an asterisk or to list them in a separate hyperlinked list of essential reading placed behind the index.

Filename

The filename for a bundle must contain the case reference, a short version of the name of the case and an indication of the content of the bundle – e.g. “CO12342021 Carpenters v Adventurers Hearing Bundle” or “CO12342021 Carpenters v Adventurers Authorities Bundle”.

Hyperlinked Index

Each entry in the index must be hyperlinked to the indexed document.

Numbering

All pages in an e-bundle must be numbered by computer-generated numbering, not by hand. The numbering should start at page 1 for the first page of the bundle (whether or not that is part of an index) and the numbering must follow sequentially to the last page of the bundle to ensure the pagination matches the pdf numbering. If a hard copy of the bundle is produced, the pagination must match the e-bundle.

Para 2 of the general guidance is temporarily suspended in public law children proceedings. During the period of suspension, further enquiries will be undertaken to examine the operational and resource consequences of the general guidance to local authorities and those representing respondents in public law proceedings. A working group comprising of representatives from the Judiciary, the FLBA and the ALC has been established to examine the issues and make recommendations.

OCR

All pages in an e-bundle that contain typed text must be subject to OCR (optical character recognition) if they have not been created directly as electronic text documents. This makes it easier to search for text, highlight parts of a page, and to copy text from the bundle.

Core Bundle

If a core bundle is required, then a PDF core bundle should be produced complying with the same requirements as a paper bundle.

Number of Bundles

When preparing for a case, thought should be given to the number of bundles required. It is usually better to have a single hearing e-bundle and (where appropriate) a separate single authorities e-bundle (compiled in accordance with requirements), rather than multiple bundles. These should follow any applicable court-specific guidance.

Delivering by Email

If a bundle is to be sent by email, ensure the file size is not too large. For justice.gov e-mail addresses the maximum size of email and attachments is 36Mb in aggregate. Anything larger will be rejected. The subject line of the email should contain the case number, short-form case name, hearing date and if known, the name of judge.

Delivering by Uploading

Bundles should be sent to the court in accordance with the court’s directions. Where the bundle would otherwise be sent by email (rather than being uploaded to a portal) but is too large to be sent under cover of a single email then it may be sent to the Document Upload Centre by prior arrangement with the court.

Interested to learn more? Get in touch with us today to download our free guide on e-bundle creation and access your pre-set templates.

2022 In Review

2022 was a busy year for the team at Bundledocs.  

Having introduced our solution to the market, we have significantly grown our business, welcomed new team members, entered new regions and created new offerings and updates for our new and existing clients.  

In 2022, we had the opportunity to get back on the road and meet our customers post-pandemic. Our team went global and covered groundwork in London, Australia, New Zealand and the U.S.  

We kicked off the year by expanding our Senior Leadership Team, welcoming Non-Executive Director, Simon Hill to the Bundledocs family. Following his appointment in March, we also welcomed Peter Zver as the VP of Revenue and Operations in North America in June.  

Our expansion also gave us the opportunity to attend our first ever ILTACON – the leading legal technology conference in the U.S. - at Gaylord National Harbour in Maryland – where we showcased the functionality of our Bundledocs Editor, highlighting new features such as in-document PDF editing, manipulating and annotating, as well as the ability to share PDF documents all from within the web browser. 

Not only did we attend ILTACON, but we also flew from continent to continent to ensure we covered all our bases – and met with as many industry professionals as possible, including a trip to Australia, where we met the Consul General, Rosie Keane, at the Irish Consulate in Sydney.  

After our journey to Sydney, we travelled to Auckland to meet with other legal tech companies and demonstrate the functionality of our latest offerings, including our PDF Editor at Lawfest 2022 - New Zealand’s premier legal innovation & technology event, in which we were headline sponsors.  

In addition to our showcasing at Lawfest, we attended multiple events in London – including iManage ConnectLive 2022 and the British Legal Technology Forum - and hopped across the pond to exhibit at Inspire 2022 with NetDocuments – where we spoke with our many partners and showcased our seamless integration and had a little fun along the way.  

We have learned a lot in 2022 and we look forward to continuing our growth in 2023.  

Make sure to follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter to keep up with the latest about Bundledocs.

PDF as a Service: More than a fad but a way forward

The Bundledocs team recently hosted a ILTA product webinar and we wanted to provide an additional avenue to recap some of the highlights as well as access the recording in it’s entirety.

Bundledocs was born in the cloud to provide solutions for bundling and binding. Over the last five years or so, especially as the industry’s move to the cloud has accelerated, there’s been a greater need to access and leverage the most popular PDF functions via an integrated cloud service.

Key to Bundledocs’ success in binding and bundling over the years has been the ability to manipulate, edit, and annotate the PDF content within the Bundle or Binder. This PDF functionality described as easy to use and just right in functionality by Bundledocs clients’ has  forced Bundledocs to offer ‘’PDF editing’’ as a service , meaning its applicable either  inside or outside of the Bundle ( i.e. against a single PDF document). Simply stated “PDF as Service” is the delivery of the most popular PDF functions via an Integrated Cloud Service.

Useful Context

According to recent ILTA Technology Survey data, 50% of law firm documents are already residing in the cloud via a cloud-based document management system, with the trend to exceed “90% cloud” within five years. On the contrary, within the last five years, there has been zero change around PDF editing. The same providers are delivering the same legacy functionality so the gap between where documents are localized and where they're going to be addressed via PDF is glaring.

Leading up to ILTACON 2022, Bundledocs asked conference attendees to take a 1-minute survey to help us better understand ILTA members’ PDF editing and binding practices, as well as most used features. We know the UK and Asia-Pacific markets needs and requirements well but wanted to reach out directly to US firms as part of our conference discovery mission.

Of the 57 respondents (thanks again to everyone for making time to help us with this!), 25% consider PDF editing/binding tools as part of a ‘cloud first’ strategy. Surprising to us, 42% said they did not know how this functionality figures into their cloud strategy.

In the UK and Australia, we have seen a surge in cloud adoption around document bundling and now PDF editing so are keen to engage with US and Canadian firms to share best practices and lessons learned around the cloud and the ‘PDF as a Service’ trend … hence the recent webinar. interesting was feedback we received regarding “most widely used features in a PDF Editor after viewing”. Top five responses included:

  1. Splitting/combining/manipulating PDF files (91%)

  2. OCR of PDF files (73%)

  3. Annotating and redacting PDF files (69%)

  4. Converting files to Word or other (69%)

  5. Text editing (42%)

What stood out was the popularity of OCR as part of PDF editing process for firms in the US and Canada. This indicates that users want fully searchable access to the published PDF content and similar functions as part of their document production workflow, and primarily use products they own for core functionality.

Based on this research feedback and what we’ve heard in our numerous conversations with law firm users, our mission, basically, is to address this and position ourselves as a cloud service around PDF.

If you are interested in seeing PDF-as-a-Service at work, please check out our recent webinar including a live demo and related discussion.

Making the Move From Manual

Do you find that your firm is spending too much time and money on extracting, creating and sharing manual bundles? Making the move from paper-based processes to an automated system may seem daunting, even when the changeover is deemed necessary.  

With remote and hybrid working prominent features in firms around the world, companies have begun to digitally transform, looking for ways in which their firms can operate efficiently.   

Here are some of the benefits of making the move: 

Timesaving 

According to the 2019 Legal Trends Report, the average lawyer in the US works only 2.5 hours of billable work each day. When compared to a standard 8-hour workday, the typical lawyer only has a 31% utilization rate. 

Within legal practices there is a requirement for a heavy human element within the workflow process, as a service-based practice. Automation, in short, will not replace lawyers but will assist them in efficiently allocating their time.  

Unnecessary time wasting can be eradicated with information and documents being managed electronically ensuring employees are free to increase billable hours elsewhere within the firm. 

“I created a bundle in two hours the old way, then I did it again using Bundledocs, it only took twenty minutes. This process takes all the pain out of ensuring that bundles are created on time and are paginated properly. It simplified a time-consuming task that used to require too much manpower and supervision.”
— Partner, Kennedy Frewen O'Sullivan 

Reduce paper use 

Utilizing cloud storage accessible online means you no longer need to worry about lugging around reams of paper from place to place. Instead of wasting time on printing and spending money on ink for your printer utilizing digital solutions can save you both time and money. 

By using solutions such as our electronic bundling tool or our PDF Editor you can handle all document preparation and share electronically. A digital solution allows you to draft as many documents as possible without the need to print unnecessarily. 

“Bundledocs is the only alternative I could find to using a fully paperless system. Everything else is cumbersome and places added costs and time in trying to make a truly paperless brief. Bundledocs allows you to run multiple files at once, and using templates allows it to be tailored for different purposes.”
— Owner Manager, Mortgage Choice 

 

Better Document Control and Security 

A study by the American Bar Association found that 76% of large law firms report that their clients want firms to implement more stringent security requirements. Cloud-based solutions have developed ways to protect sensitive data from breaches including features such as password protection to encrypted hyperlinks for sharing.  

At Bundledocs, our cloud-based solution was the first e-bundling tool to be ISO 27001 certified, ensuring that your data is safeguarded from potential security threats. From the moment you share your files, you have full visibility of their status – from delivery to download by the intended recipient.  

“The firm takes security very seriously and Bundledocs has good security around it – for example, you can have two-factor authentication if you want it. ”
— Head of IT and partner, Fisher Jones Greenwood

 

Interested in starting your free trial today? Contact a member of our team to get started today.  

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