Benefits of Improving Document Collaboration and Using Document Collaboration Tools

• Author: Dennis Kennedy - Tom Mighell
• Pages: 45-49

45

Benefits of Improving

Document Collaboration

and Using Document

Collaboration Tools

The legal document, in its many forms, is the primary tangible

“deliverable” of a lawyer’s services. From the opinion letter to

the appellate brief, from the summary judgment motion to the

memorandum, from the contract to the revocable trust, the

legal profession produces documents—so many, in fact, that

a special size of paper was named for them: legal size. As law-

yers moved from quill and ink to typewriter to word processor,

however, the basic structure and content of legal documents

evolved slowly and changed little.

Paper documents are solid. Lawyers often feel more com-

fortable with something they can hold in their hands. They

can control the document and point to its original. They can

mark on documents, edit them, and put proofreading marks on

them. They can sign them with fancy pens, stamp them with

notary seals, and make endless paper copies of them to place

in manila file folders or stack in large piles on their desks.

The world of the comfortable and familiar has changed a

lot since the turn of the century. Most documents today are

born in electronic form, and some suggest that more than

90 percent of the documents created today will never be

printed. Litigators facing an increase in electronic discovery

requests now must determine what is and is not a document.

The days of placing a draft on the partner’s chair or mail-

ing out paper drafts to clients are all but over. We now send

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