Filevine users already know the power of automation to supercharge their practice. But now the next generation of case management automation has arrived. And you won’t believe what it can do.
Another Way to Draft
Drafting. For lawyers, the word probably conjures up the slow and plodding work of creating new documents. We draft complex contracts, medical chronologies, demand letters, and a million other documents, day after day. It’s important, work. It requires hyperfocus and attention — mistakes could be catastrophic. It’s urgent and high-stakes. And it’s also sometimes tedious and tiresome.
But there’s another meaning to ‘drafting.’ In physics, drafting happens when a group becomes aerodynamic, getting rid of drag by riding in each others’ slipstream. It’s why cyclists ride in long lines and birds fly in a V formation.
What if the first kind of drafting could gain some of the ease and speed of the second?
Introducing: Filevine Fusion. This new set of features will change how you draft documents and create reports. It cuts the drag and reduces the effort in your work. Like a flying V, Fusion creates a new level of efficiency by bringing each part of your case management system into coordination with the others.
What this means is a radical reduction in the time required by legal matters. And it’s coming at a crucial time.
The Legal Time Crisis
The 2008 recession remade law into a ‘buyer’s market’. It ushered in a hyper-competitive era, where the winners transformed their practice in order to better cater to demanding and empowered clients. Out of this dilemma, innovation grew: we saw the growth of new billing structures like fixed fees, an openness to automation tools, and a general focus on cutting costs and improving client service.
Now, after a decade of difficulty and stagnation, the market for legal services is finally showing some welcome growth. However, most of the benefits are going to the country’s largest firms. Those are also the firms with the greatest access to expensive cutting-edge technology and automation through economies of scale. But most firms continue to struggle. An industry-wide solution to the legal time crisis just didn’t exist. Until now.
Filevine Fusion brings cutting edge automation to firms and legal teams of any size. It delivers a dramatic reduction in time investments for drafting legal matters and launching complex reports. Those are savings that can be passed on directly to clients.
Here are 3 ways Filevine Fusion will change the face of legal work for its users:
1. Next Level Document Generation
Filevine Fusion puts a new universe of documents within the reach of automation.
Document creation is at the core of legal work. Sometimes that work is rewarding and meaningful — such as the memos and motions that require forethought, analysis, and expertise. But we’re expected to churn out a host of other documents, such as medical chronologies, demand letters, conditional contracts, or exhibit lists. These are crucial documents and must be done correctly. And they eat up hours and hours of our time.
Our first line of relief has been Automatic Document Generation technology. By taking information directly from the case files, and automatically filling out form documents, legal teams can save a huge amount of time. And they can also create a cleaner case record, with less worry over user error. Before Doc Gen, many attorneys would hunt down a similar document to use as a template, input new information, and then hopefully save it under a new name in the correct place. Each step was open to mistakes. You could waste time searching for the right template. You could fail to replace all relevant data (meaning a letter to Mr. Smith refers to him as Ms. Jones halfway through). Or you could accidentally click ‘Save’ after your edits instead of ‘Save As,’ thereby losing your previous version and storing this one in the wrong file.
Filevine users already rely on state-of-the-art automatic document generation tools. And added to that are other unique features to further increase efficiency and reduce user error, such as Edit-in-Place abilities.
So what’s so new about Filevine Fusion?
The answer is the extra levels of complexity that you can now automate.
We’re not just talking about form letters, which automatically get a new name, date, and address. Filevine Fusion can automate a complex conditional contract in one click. Or a rich case summary, complete with outstanding tasks, incoming deadlines, and current case values. It can compile medical chronologies, demand letters, exhibit lists, and a host of other documents that regularly eat up your time and attention.
The automatic document generation can include graphs, charts, and complex formatting. They can include Excel Formulas and Word QuickParts. The tool is fully customizable: whatever set of specifications you can imagine, you can generate a set of documents from it.
Existing automatic document generation tools are a massive time-saver. But their benefits are dwarfed by the possibilities of Filevine Fusion.
2. Flawless Trial Prep
The weeks before a trial are a flurry of activity. You’re meeting with clients and preparing exhibits. You’re researching and drafting a legal strategy. And you’re also responsible for generating pages and pages of detailed case documents.
This pre-trial prep work comprises 10-15% of all the work put into a case, squeezed into a few weeks. But Filevine Fusion can help here as well, automating your tasks to free you for more complex work.
With Filevine Fusion, a single click can create a pre-trial packet. This can include exhibit lists, expert witness information, insurance information — all formatted to fit the template you require. Many legal jurisdictions require a templatized packet of case information to be due before the actual court date. With Filevine Fusion, you don’t have to waste your time — or your paralegal’s — hunting down each piece of relevant information. Create your packet with a click of a button, and then move onto other business.
Using this tool means faster and more accurate work. And that means savings that you can pass on to your clients. At a time when clients have more power and are demanding more economical and technologically advanced representation, tools like Filevine Fusion are pathways toward client loyalty.
3. Rapid, Rich Reporting
Take one look at Amazon and Google and it’s clear: we live in an age of opportunity for those who know how to gather their data and deploy it well.
Attorneys are no exception. Advanced case-management systems like Filevine already hold huge amounts of data concerning our work and our industry. If we visualize and analyze that information, it can guide us toward smarter financial decisions, better management and marketing decisions, and more rewarding practice.
Filevine Fusion removes any remaining barriers between attorneys and the insights held in their data.
Filevine Fusion lets you run multiple reports at once, across all project types, and combine them into a customized super report. That means with a single click, you can generate any combination of reports you can think of. You can look at current caseload stats, workload analysis, and demand generation. You can generate reports on mass tort clients, or combine task reports with deadline reports.
Filevine Fusion also lets you export these to an Excel document, already built-in with pivot tables, charts, and graphs. It empowers you to create a cohesive snapshot of the state of your law firm, with a single click of a button.
Many attorneys hunger for clear metrics to help them steer their practice. But the daily drudge-work of recording data on separate spreadsheets is too discouraging. They fall behind on their stats and wind up resorting to guesswork and intuition again when it comes time to make decisions.
But with one centralized, cloud-based case management system, information enters the system once, as part of your regular casework, and is then available for all reports. Now with Filevine Fusion, that information can feed into any complex set of reports that you need to guide your practice.
This is Just the Beginning
For billions of years after life evolved on the planet, it remained in relatively simple, tiny forms. Then in the early Cambrian Period, complex animal forms exploded onto the scene. Life crossed a threshold of complexity, and its development speed took off exponentially.
This development model isn’t just for ancient trilobites. It’s a pattern that shows up again and again — increased complexity leads to a sudden outburst of creativity.
Today, legal technology is crossing that complexity threshold. And Filevine Fusion is the leading edge of that rapid innovation.
There is still no telling what Filevine users will create through the unlimited possibilities of Filevine Fusion, or how they will adjust and customize these tools to support their work and their vision. But we’re certain that it’s their creativity, exploration, and foresight — along with the right tool — that will build the future of our legal industry.
Learn more about the power of Filevine Fusion