Despite recent advances, comprehensive, efficient and easy-to-use document management has tended to elude law firms up to now.  Whilst recent progress has been made in areas like email, keeping track of documents has typically meant having to tag them individually, retrieval has ignored documents on mobile devices and tablets, and search has tended to be clunky.

In founding my new IT law firm, I wanted the latest and the best in a secure, resilient document management system (DMS). As a start-up law firm, getting your IT spot-on right from day one is critical - for delivering value to clients, for efficiency, and because it’s a lot easier to scale with the right technology in place.  So we researched the market and chose MetaJure Smart DMS.

A Seattle, Washington (USA) developer of software solutions for the legal industry, MetaJure, Inc., was founded by senior practising lawyers who worked both in-house and externally with Microsoft.  The MetaJure Smart DMS has rapidly gained a following in North America and was ranked No. 2 in the 2014 list of Top 10 New Products for Lawyers by the influential US legal technology newsletter, TechnoLawyer TL NewsWire.  Kemp IT Law is the first user of MetaJure in the UK.

There are a number of new features available with MetaJure Smart DMS.  First, it automatically collects, stores and indexes the firm’s information, removing the need to manually profile and tag documents that lawyers find so irritating and saving them significant time.  Second, a bit like the Heineken ad, MetaJure captures parts of a law firm’s information that other DMS’s cannot.  Other DMS’s typically include just over 50% of a firm’s emails and documents.  With MetaJure, firms can be confident that they can collect 100% of their emails and documents because MetaJure can include information stored in lawyers’ ‘My Documents’ folder, laptop or mobile device and make that information accessible.  Thirdly, MetaJure provides the user with a powerfully intuitive, filterable Google-like search so he or she can quickly find the document they’re looking for.

This new technology can work alongside other DMS’s, enabling a firm to preserve the value of its sunk investment.  A further feature of MetaJure that attracted Kemp IT Law is the ability to run the product on a new server installed at the firm’s secure private cloud, thus providing an extra layer of security and resilience.