In general, The fast way (in a large law office) scanning works like this:
1. A secretary receives all the mail and then sorts it so that it goes to the
proper departments (ie: Civil, Comp or perhaps Comp Team #1, Comp Team #2, etc).
2. A legal secretary from a specific department opens the mail and enters it in
Case Activity either by pulling the client card or more quickly by using the
Mail Tracker. This secretary decides if this piece of mail needs to be scanned.
if so, when entering a description of the mail in Case Activity the secretary
clicks the Scan button in the lower right corner after entering the case
activity description and a "Scan Instruction Form" is printed. They
then may specify what is to be done with the correspondence after scanning
(shred, send to attorney, file, etc). A1-Law automatically prints on the
instruction sheet what to name the document (this is the Number such as
83412-98).
The scan instruction sheet is then attached to the correspondence and placed in
a bin and sent off the scan department. The legal secretary's job is complete
and the scanning is delegated to the mail room/scan department. The case
activity entry is now entered but the document is not yet scanned or attached to
that case activity entry.
3. Most scanner/copiers today will easily scan at 50-60 pages / minute. Further,
the scanner has a TCP/IP port so it does not need to be attached to a computer.
One may program the scanner to automatically save all files in a specific folder
on the network (such as F:\data\ScannedDocuments or some other folder. The scan
department takes each correspondence in the bin and knows what to name each
Adobe Acrobat pdf file by the Number on the Scan Instruction Form that the legal
secretary attached to that correspondence. The scan department scans and names the
document and the scanner automatically saves all the documents in the
ScannedDocuments folder. No one in the mail room/scan department even needs to
know how to use a computer or ever needs to go into A1-Law.
4. Now we have a lot of filenames in the ScannedDocuments Folder. The names
might be names like 442-21 885-34 1243-51 61-14 etc. Now, at the end of each day
or every few days a system administrator goes into the Scan Tracker in A1-Law
and clicks the Transfer button and A1-Law automatically copies and attaches all
those documents into their proper case in case activity for all those files. The
Scan Tracker
can process approximately 100 documents in around 10 seconds. We are done. The magic
is complete.
5. It can be taken a step further but for now we have been told from other
offices doing this that they can easily scan several hundred documents a day.
Further, there are far fewer mis-filings. Finally, some attorneys no longer have
a file clerk - in fact, in many situations they don't even have a physical file
at all! This leads us to #6 below.
6. From the Scan Tracker arises the A1-Law Transfer
Utility. This module
(already in A1-Law) allows attorneys to quickly (within 2-4 minutes) transfer
all their open cases to their laptop computer and then they no longer need to
take physical files to court. Since we are paperless with the Scan Tracker, all
we need is A1-Law on a laptop computer.
7. The Transfer Utility is currently a "one way sync." Soon, it will
be a "two way sync" which will allow attorneys to work
"offline" without internet access and then sync their changes when
they come back to the office or sync them via Email or internet access. Since
internet access is not everywhere (ie: on a plane or perhaps it is wireless and
it's just not a fast connection) the transfer utility allows one to see their
entire case load and the two way sync will allow one to make changes to the
data.