Transitioning your legal activities to paperless operation enables your organization with a number of advantages in addition to cost savings. Files can no longer be lost from former employees or be placed in the wrong cabinet or folder. Access is tightly controlled to only those who need files, and the files themselves have a digital trail of timestamps and access logs to carefully curate who has changed or accessed them.
Your legal team can access documents from anywhere in the world, at any time – all while keeping your corporate social responsibility department happy with the green savings on paper and filing supplies. This new way of working is more efficient and can save valuable hours in both the time that it takes to find files and by automating basic tasks. DiliTrust Governance can help your firm’s legal department make an easy and controlled transition to a paperless office without changing any of your internal processes, while greatly improving governance practices.
More Than Just an Electronic Filing Cabinet
Think of DiliTrust Governance as a digital file storage facility which houses all the relevant data related to any legal matter handled by your legal department. But it is much more than storage for your legal files. It also allows for the creation, revision, approval, consumption and reuse of matters and contracts, both internally and with outside counsel, and lets you see at a glance what holdings your company has in real estate, subsidiaries, and more. DiliTrust Governance logs the activities performed by each lawyer or staff member on your team to enhance teamwork, simplify management processes, and provide an audit trail.
It not only allows for access and control of all legal matters, contracts, R&D and intellectual property, but assigns a financial cost to each so it is easy to view financials. Many of your department’s existing workflows can be automated, such as sending documents to multiple stakeholders for signatures. Dilitrust will set up these workflows for you based on your requirements.
Aspects of Going Paperless DiliTrust Governance: Customized for Your Business
One of the typical concerns of executives in legal departments and corporations is that vital information will be lost when transitioning storage rooms full of paper files to a legal management software solution. While there is some initial heavy lifting in terms of scanning and organizing documents, DiliTrust Governance will be customized for you according to your organization’s current filing system. We adapt to your organization’s workflows and processes. Once you start using DiliTrust Governance, you will wonder why you stayed with paper for so long. As part of our Customer Experience promise, we will ensure that you and your staff receive proper training. The access and audit trails that can be created using DiliTrust Governance provide an extra layer of accountability over and above the old system of paper filing, and these access logs can also be customized for you by our team.
Corporate Social Responsibility Aspects of Going Paperless
The corporate social responsibility and financial benefits of going paperless extend to more than just the cost of the paper and filing systems. Many funding and carbon offset programs are available in Canada, either through government or private enterprise, to reward businesses for environmentally responsible actions. The legal department of any business is responsible for a large proportion of its paper use, and switching the department to paperless operation will generate a noticeable uptick in the metrics used in Canadian corporate social responsibility programs and awards such as Corporate Knights.
Centralize Management of Your Legal Activities
In a recent article in Canadian Lawyer, Jeremy Farr, general counsel at the Bank of Canada, discussed the need to unify data for proper record retention and retrieval as a pain point for his organization. “We have a proliferation of systems across a variety of different platforms that don’t communicate with one another. We don’t have a centralized search capability, so, both in terms of responding to access to information and litigation discovery, it has become problematic,” said Farr.
DiliTrust Governance solves this issue by being the one system that you can use for all legal records, in addition to any finances which are associated with real estate, contracts, or any other legal matters in your business. This can also allow for increased transparency of financials for your board and C-suite executives as it is now possible to see Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) at a glance such as real estate holdings, subsidiary company holdings, and other company assets.
For more information on using DiliTrust Governance to enable a transition to a paperless legal department, contact us today.
