There is always a clash between established people/companies/products, and new upcoming stars that challenge the status quo.

There’s always a Goliath and always a David, eager to challenge the status quo. In every industry, we see a Ford that is challenged by a young challenger like Toyota. Or an established iPhone, being challenged by a Samsung smartphone.

The Problem of Established Legal Case Management Vendors

We also see this clash-of-titans scenario with Case Management platforms. The established vendors like keeping things as they are. And who can blame them?

Their workflows, systems, checks, and balances… all these details are in place because of some necessity they successfully addressed, years ago.

They faced problems and designed systems to deal with the problems.

But, times are changing.

Laws change, people are more interested in engaging legislative organizations as more and more people become aware of their rights.

This people-generated disruption is a strong destabilizing factor and established vendors push back strongly to proposed changes.

This tension puts the workers in Legal organizations such as The Office of General Counsel in a very unusual situation.

On one hand, we are facing software-induced limitations that are there for some issues that may nowadays be non-issues. And on the other hand, we’re dealing with people who were probably mistreated in more than one way, and seek our guidance.

As we are working with people, we expect that the software we use be in service of our service to these people. Not the other way around, i.e. clients needing to adjust to software limitations.

The challenge is that we find it difficult to get this software to keep up with changing demands. Heavyweights, established vendors don’t do a good job of listening to beneficiaries. We’ll leave the reasons for this off our discussion for today, but it is a problem that’s slowing down progress, and these software solutions are becoming part of the problem.

Such product-to-market disconnect is leaving some room for a disruption.

How Disruptors Make Life Easier for Office of General Counsel Staff

Unlike Established vendors, there are new, vibrant, innovative teams that have a different take on a problem, and offer a more flexible solution.

And they have to. Otherwise, there would be no reason for their existence on the market.

What makes these innovators ‘Industry Disruptors’ is the effect they have on the value of existing products and services in the industry. They are quick to adapt to customer expectations and respond to their ever-growing needs. The Legal Sector is not short of this phenomenon either.
Let’s take for an example, a complex organization such as the Office of General Counsel, and their software needs.

In the Office of General Counsel there is always a need for innovative changes especially when it comes to the key functional groups:

• Legal Case Management,
• Records Management and
• Correspondence Management.

One excellent industry disruptor is ArkCase. This Modern Case Management System treats any form-based, workflow-dependent process like a case. Whether it’s opening a complaint, or starting a legal case, or starting a new dispute, ArkCase sees all these as cases with their own forms, workflows, and people, doing specific things to specific forms, in a specific point of the workflow.

This approach can help the staff of the Office of General Counsel to take fewer and more straightforward steps in daily activities such as:

• receiving new cases,
• managing of existing cases,
• keeping records of previous cases, and
• doing effective correspondence management with all parties involved.

The software will only need customized forms, workflows, access-level management, and it can easily adapt to any need that any department within the General Counsel would ever have.
Armedia has built various Case Management solutions based on ArkCase, and from our experience, we believe that ArkCase innovations can increase the effectiveness of any Office of General Counsel Department. Here are a few of these innovations:

• Customized workflow according to the specific needs of the Office of General Counsel department
• Automation of the entire process of Legal Case Management
• Automated audio and video transcription with Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Fully-established System of communication and collaboration
• Automatic status update for each step of the process
• Web-based and cloud-based centralized database
• Fully-established System of Case Organization

All of these Legal Case Management innovations contribute to increasing the productivity of Office of General Counsel staff.

Let’s focus on just 5 benefits that ArkCase offers.

1.   Makes Legal Case Management Simpler and Easier to Handle

The ArkCase Legal Case Management System makes the entire process of Legal Case Management much more straightforward and easier to handle.

The most important Legal Case Management Innovation that contributes to this is the Automation of Legal Case Management. This feature allows customized workflow for any Office of General Counsel department, according to their specific needs. It also provides automatic status updates for each step of the process, to all parties involved in the case.

By outlining stages, determining priorities, and enabling communication with clients, the customized workflow feature allows each employee to always know the role of any other colleague in the process.

Another innovation that allows ArkCase to simplify the legal case management process is centralized data storage. This allows the Office of General Counsel to store all case-related data and metadata in one virtual location. This virtual location is easily searchable, which makes case management much easier than if workers would need to search for case-related data in different databases and document management systems.

This innovation helps Office of General Counsel staff save time and effort and use them more efficiently.

2.   Enables Easy Access to Case Records

In trying to increase the productivity of your Office of General Counsel, ArkCase Legal Case Management System provides easier access to client information.

The centralized database we mentioned contributes also to better accessibility of records. Being cloud-based and web-based, it enables your Office of General Counsel to work with the information stored, form any place and device that has an internet connection. In addition, if you need DoD 5015 compliant records management, Armedia has integrated ArkCase with Alfresco, the only open-source DoD 5015 compliant RM solution.

This feature enables the Office of General Counsel staff to work and be productive out of their office.

3.   Offers Better Case Organization

A fully-established system which deals with case organization is crucial for any Office of General Counsel. The reason for this is the fact that one of the major responsibilities of the Office of General Counsel is handling deadlines associated with a Legal Case.

The ArkCase Legal Case Management System will make sure that you’ll never miss an important date.

Our platform also includes:

• Measuring the time spent on each Legal Case
• Providing elaborated Billing Statements
• Scheduling meetings and hearings
• Automated audio and video transcription
• File organization
• Arranging tasks
• Outlook and calendaring

This allows the staff at the Office of General Counsel to focus on quality in their work instead of chasing appointments, deadlines etc.

4.   Makes Change Tracking Easier

An innovation like ‘Automatic Status Update’ allows managers to easily track each step of each employee of the process and always know their roles in it.

Tracking changes in any legal case is very important for all parties involved. ArkCase stores data and metadata edits and stores timestamps for each edit and associates each change to a team member.

This feature greatly reduces the stress of managing sensitive cases by keeping clear records of every change ever made, by anyone involved in the case.

5.   Streamlines Communication with Clients and Colleagues

Communication and collaboration is a huge part of Legal Case Management. Unfortunately, is not always easy as it may seem. It’s very easy to lose track of those group emails that go from everybody to everybody on the team.

That’s why a well-established system of communication and collaboration with clients and colleagues/departments/organizations is a useful feature for any Office of General Counsel.

Any Modern Legal Case Management System like ArkCase joints communication and collaboration in one interface. This system saves tons of time and frustration and allows teams to use this time to serve more clients.

Conclusion

While established products and vendors aim at preserving the Status Quo, Legal workers in large organizations like the Office of General Counsel struggle to keep up with ever-growing, ever-changing demands by their clients.

Industry Disruptors like ArkCase are taking a different look at how work could look like for large organizations such as the Office of General Counsel.

These large organizations regularly deal with correspondence management, complaint management, case management, etc. By viewing all these distinct processes as cases, ArkCase allows organizations to use a single, integrated, web-based system, to manage all their workflows.

Thanks to such an integrated approach, ArkCase enables organizations to:

• Simplify legal case management with automation and centralized data storage
• Easily access cases from out-of-office locations
• Enjoy an improved case organization
• Keep track of all changes ever made
• Improve productivity with Streamlined collaboration

With this approach, large and small legal organizations can be much better equipped to handle the increased workload and do everything much faster, easier, and have much more pleased clients.

If you want to find out more about how ArkCase Legal Case Management can increase the productivity of your Office of General Counsel, feel free to contact us.