Many legal technology companies (and other business productivity apps, for that matter) require you to use their product a single way—their way. You get shoehorned into their workflows, their dashboards, and their reports. NetDocuments, the legal document management platform, meets you where you work. Likely due to their experience in the industry, they allow many different approaches to accessing and using your documents. Whether you’re interacting with the dashboard, searching for a file, delivering, editing, assembling, or simply communicating about a document, you can approach the task the way you want to.
NetDocuments Dashboard
Initially, when you connect with NetDocuments through the web portal, you’ll see a dashboard with all of the quick links you need to operate your day. You can see your frequently accessed reports, your most recent documents, and other favorited items that you want to get to quickly. This dashboard can be personalized to fit your needs by you or others on your team—who you give access to your dashboard. You can easily organize, share, and collaborate, all using your specific dashboard.
Searching for Documents
Obviously, your dashboard isn’t the only way to access documents in your system. NetDocuments also has a global search feature that not only searches information about files, but also information inside of files. The platform performs optical character recognition (OCR) on each document uploaded into the system. Which allows users to essentially ‘shop’ for documents based on their contents.
Delivering Documents to Others
Ultimately, in most cases, a document you’re working on needs to be sent to another party—a client, a team member, or an opposing attorney. With NetDocuments, you can deliver them for Consumption, with a link, for Execution, via DocuSign, or Collaboration through their Collab Spaces. Each of these methods provides high levels of control to the user and extended functionality that lawyers often need—like receipt notification.
Editing Documents
Although storage, retrieval, and delivery of documents are vitally important to a law office, creating and editing documents is usually the heart and soul of legal work. So, NetDocuments has integrated their document management functionality directly into Microsoft Word. This allows you to work locally, and save globally, by checking out documents from the repository, and then saving them directly back into NetDocuments from your local Word app. This also allows for stellar version control.
For those looking for collaboration instead of versioning, however, NetDocuments has also integrated with Microsoft 365. Using the document editor online allows you to access a file with multiple users simultaneously. This may not be your cup of tea, but it is another way NetDocuments allows users to approach their data in whatever way they are most comfortable.
Document Assembly
NetDocuments doesn’t just assume that its users will need to deliver single documents in Word format. After all, it’s a legal document management platform. Using their Setbuilder function, users can assemble large PDFs for delivery to other parties. These documents can be easily bates-stamped, indexed, and turned into a PDF-A document. Additionally, you can customize the document and make it appear the way that you prefer (i.e., numbered sections rather than Roman numerals).
Communication
Whether we like it or not, many of us live in our email system. We’ve created complex filing methods in our local Outlook app, and our day is directed by reminders and tasks built into that system. NetDocuments has built its Outlook email integration with these lawyers in mind. Most of the document management functionality you can find on the webapp also lives inside Outlook. Filing emails and incoming files, and even attaching documents to outgoing messages, are seamlessly integrated into NetDocuments.
If you’d like to learn more, take a look at Zack’s recent demo with NetDocuments. You can see all the above features, and more, in action.
How to Get It
Ready to learn more? Head over to NetDocuments.com to see their solutions, resources, and even an ROI calculator.
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Last updated January 26th, 2024
