ILTACon 2024 convened a few weeks ago in Nashville. Workstorm surveyed attendees to gather feedback; the results underscored what we heard in discussions taking place throughout the conference. Three common, often challenging, themes emerged: information governance, matter workflow, and secure file sharing.
Law firms can tackle these foundational challenges by implementing the right collaboration and matter management solution.
Information Governance
At ILTACon, several firms expressed that they were only beginning their information governance initiatives. They were interested to hear from leaders at firms who had experience with the initiative. Many speakers talked about the significant challenges that emerged when using collaboration and matter management solutions with anyone outside their firm. There are consequences to using ubiquitous technology like email, phones, and text messaging on personal devices for communicating with clients.
Workstorm offers solutions: Implementing information governance protocols within a collaboration platform allows a firm to ensure compliance with all communications. It minimizes the risk of data breaches, maintains data privacy, and safeguards privileged and sensitive client information. Information governance administrators must be able to set specific and custom retention policies by the type of communication taking place within the platform.
Through its Matter Folders feature, Workstorm enables administrators to effectively enforce compliance policies by designating channels for specified purposes, including communication with clients. They will be able to quickly deploy matter-based channels, manage role-based access, and assign custom retention and compliance policies by matter. Role-based access separates information governance personnel from the details of the matter and protects privileged client-attorney communications. Workstorm’s compliance module simplifies reporting and oversight.
Matter Workflow
Law firms are currently inundated with a diverse tech stack that includes both disparate and overlapping solutions. In many firms, there is almost no ability to track individual workloads and nothing to capture the time spent on tasks not directly related to billing. Enabling legal teams to track case progress, communicate clearly, find and review key documents quickly, set client expectations, and monitor matter milestones in real-time—from a single platform, improve firm efficiency and team effectiveness.
How can one define specific legal workflow task types, track and analyze those task categories, templatize workflows, create task dependencies, and automate task notifications? And of course, timing is crucial to legal work. How can one manage and enable a visual display of due dates, case dates, and deadlines? A solution built for the unique workflow of the law firm is essential. The solution should organize work by matter, track the workloads of individual team members, and provide an overview of all tasks related to each matter. Vitally, information governance must be considered in the context of tracking legal workflow, as sensitive and confidential information could be improperly handled during the collaborative process.
Workstorm has built a platform specifically for legal workflow. It facilitates effective collaboration among internal and external teams by providing secure communication, real-time and asynchronous document review, and case management capability. One platform centralizes messaging, video conferencing, document management system integrations, and matter management, giving legal teams the power to quickly find matter-related information, share information on a need-to-know basis, and track workflow by matter for time and billing. Built in retention, deletion, archiving, exporting, legal hold, and review capabilities make end-of-matter processing and information governance simple.
Secure File Sharing
Secure file sharing remains a top concern in the legal industry. As long as email continues to be one of the most common forms of communication with external parties, bad actors will attempt to gain access to sensitive and privileged information via spoofing and phishing attacks. Even collaboration channels are becoming targets of phishing attacks and IT needs to prepare to combat attempts to gain access to sensitive firm information through popular platforms.
Workstorm helps move file sharing out of email and into secure channels to reduce the risk of inappropriate exposure and improve operational efficiencies. Sending files for review, markup, or signature via email can quickly become convoluted and make version control unwieldy. Secure matter channels for redlining and review cut email volume and reduce the confusion of tracking document versioning. Rather than searching for files in email, legal teams can quickly search within specific matter channels. Workstorm’s Matter Folders also ensure that file sharing within these channels adheres to a firm’s compliance and privacy policies for both internal and external parties.
Law firms have made significant investments in document management systems built for the legal industry, and it is necessary for a secure file sharing system to work with those applications. Workstorm offers real-time document collaboration by combining one-click video conferencing with secure document management integrations that meet the needs of law firms and their clients. Out of the box integrations include iManage, Google Drive, OneDrive from Microsoft, Box, and Dropbox.
Summary: The Legal Advantage Includes Secure Collaboration and Matter Management
ILTACon 2024 highlighted the significant focus on information governance, matter workflow, and secure file sharing occurring across the legal industry. It can be tricky to address all three at once within a single technology solution. Workstorm addresses these challenges. Bring secure collaboration and matter management into one centralized platform purpose built for legal workflow and information governance. Talk to an expert now >>
