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Privacy protection and client services are essential to the integrity and reputation of a law firm. Corporations need to know that their confidential records will be in a safe and secure environment. If you’re a law firm, they also need this in order to trust that they can do business with you. Without those assurances, it’s hard for firms to generate new business and maintain mutually beneficial relationships with existing clients.

Cybersecurity is a growing concern for corporations, and for law firms and the clients they represent. The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a rise in cyber attacks on many institutions, including schools and hospitals. But many of those attacks were concentrated on some of the nation’s largest legal firms.

For example, in 2021, the American Bar Association put out a report that found 29 percent of law firms reported a security breach. Even more alarming is the fact that one out of five participants in that report could not say if the breach was, in fact, the first time their firewalls had been penetrated.

Digital recordkeeping is still more secure than loose paper

Don’t let those stories sour your belief in digital minute books and corporate recordkeeping. Storing corporate records in digital format is more efficient, more secure, and more cost effective than relying on traditional paper documents.

Here are some interesting stats from a report compiled by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) that further paint that picture:

• It costs law firms up to $2,000 per year to maintain a single 5 drawer filing cabinet
• Over 4 trillion paper documents are circulating the US each and every year
• The rate of new paper documents is growing at up to 200 percent per year
• Legal professionals and business owners spend up to 50 percent of their time searching for corporate records, but only 5 to 15 percent of their time actually reviewing them

Pretty alarming data, right? An over-reliance on paper documentation leaves many companies and the law firms that represent their interests scrambling to find important files in very tight deadlines. When business owners want answers to their legal questions, they don’t want time wasted trying to find the right documents that can provide that clarity. They want answers immediately, and they want to trust that your firm can supply that information.

Cloud-based entity management is more secure and flexible

Rather than have paralegals and legal professionals at the firm spend valuable billable hours searching for physical client records, there’s a more modern, efficient, and secure way to help your legal team provide immediate answers to pressing client questions. That solution is to transfer your client’s records into the cloud with an entity management platform that makes it faster and easier to get clients the information they need when they need it.

When you decide to do away with loose paper documents, you make it far easier to organize and categorize your client’s minute books. Eliminate the need for those expensive filing cabinets to store physical records by instead uploading files into the cloud. This way, you create sophisticated digital documents that you can share with your clients.

The account is restricted solely to your law firm and your client. Each account is password protected with advanced encryption and cybersecurity features to ensure all minute books and corporate records can only be accessed by those with the authorization to do so.

The best part is that, since these are cloud-based entities, clients can log into the platform and access their records from the convenience of any location in the world. Records are immediately at your fingertips whenever the need arises…provided your location has Wi-Fi.

Is your firm ready to improve corporate record security and client satisfaction? Join the MinuteBox revolution so that you can transform how your firm services clients, manages corporate records, and establishes a credible reputation as a law firm that can be trusted with the security and integrity of trade client secrets.

Efficiency is one of the core pillars of a fully functional legal entity. Time is a luxury that many corporations and general counsels have precious little to spare. In a time when technology enables people to uncover instant answers to their questions or concerns, it’s imperative that the process of completing or formalizing legal documentation be as efficient as possible.

That’s why a growing body of organizations are introducing document assembly technology to their operations. Using these types of platforms, general counsels can assemble minute books, corporate records, and legal contracts all to signature ready statuses with little to no manual changes necessary to complete the documentation.

How long does it take to draft legal documents?

There’s a growing need for innovative document automation technology due to the amount of time that companies spend drafting legal contracts. This is because it can take anywhere from several weeks to several months for lengthy or complex documents to reach the state where they are signature ready.

The length of time becomes even more daunting when multiple parties must agree upon minute book records before signing off on the agreement. Negotiating or renegotiating the terms of complex corporate documents also takes a significant amount of time, restricting an organization’s ability to productively move forward and achieve results.

These are just some of the common reasons that complicate the process of drafting and finalizing important legal documents. In order to modernize the documentation exercise into a more efficient one, companies need innovative technology to streamline the process.

What is the difference between document coding and document automation?

For many years, corporations and legal entities were required to store all minute book records and corporate documents within secure office space. Entire records would be stored in filing cabinets where legal professionals would pull and source specific records, file by file, whenever the need arose.

Advancements in technology have made this old way of maintaining corporate records obsolete. Now, all minute books and corporate documents can be digitized to reduce, if not eliminate the need for paper records to be stored at the office. Given that the average firm spends up to $2,000 per five drawer filing cabinet to store legal files, digitizing records is as much of a cost effective way of doing things as it is a time efficient solution.

However, even by digitizing records, there are more efficient ways to help your legal professionals complete their tasks. That’s the key difference between document coding and document automation.

What is document coding?

Legal document coding adds an extended piece of syntax code to standard legal documents. Firms will use document coding to expand upon minute book or corporate record templates and make them more compatible with legal document assembly software.

In the old days, document coding was an extremely difficult process. Legacy platforms were not as advanced as they are today, which required professionals to have advanced knowledge of coding syntax that matched the capabilities of a fully trained computer developer. This is a very tall order to ask of your legal professionals.

What is document automation?

Document automation is a more advanced and streamlined approach to document coding. It utilizes logic-based systems to help professionals insert additional bodies of text or data into standard legal documents. Think of it like pre-programmed modules that allow you to drag and drop additional information into your documents.

Using document automation technology, legal professionals are not required to have the coding expertise of a computer programmer. These no-code entity management solutions are the key to efficiently producing and finalizing legal documents so that organizations can move forward towards growth at faster and more efficient rates.

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Embrace document automation technology for best results

Given how easy and efficient it is to insert additional bodies of text or data with document automation technology, it’s no wonder there’s such growing demand for these solutions. By reducing the amount of time it takes to get contracts signature ready, your organization can reinvest valuable time and resources into areas of the business that directly contribute to future growth and prosperity.

Legal professionals, paralegals, and general counsels working on behalf of your firm can all save hours of time each and every day with modern technology. When you have more available hours to put towards boosting Legal Recurring Revenue and other means of growth for the business, you’re in a far better position to become a leading entity in your respective industry.

Are you ready to inject a little document automation into your corporate recordkeeping process? Join the MinuteBox revolution for a faster and more efficient way to maintain minute books, update corporate records, and eliminate the need for complex technical coding skills among your entire professional team.

Automation is essential for corporations and organizations of all sizes and scales these days. Competition is fierce, and this is perhaps nowhere more apparent than when it comes to hiring qualified talent to join the team.

Many firms want to appear innovative to both their clients and their prospective new hires. Skilled professionals often have experience with innovative technology and they appreciate the ability to streamline day to day tasks. This way, they’re able to devote more time, energy, and resources towards bigger picture solutions that help drive greater growth for the firm.

Why use technology to streamline hiring processes

Let’s say your firm is in expansion mode; you’re actively on the hunt for new professionals who can bolster the capabilities of your organization. For the sake of argument, let’s say you want to hire 10 new prospects who can add their years of experience to your firm as either legal professionals or paralegals. Now, you need to create employment contracts to solidify the offers.

This is where it gets challenging without the right technology. Drafting employment contracts from scratch is a very time consuming process. Even if you were to use a pre-written template to draft most of the document, there may be specific terms and conditions for each individual hire that need to be inserted into the contract.

What if the template isn’t easy to edit? If you add in new details into the agreement, does it disrupt the entire formatting and force you to spend more time correcting those errors?

Simplify the employment contract creation process

Given the average job offer process takes up to 7 days, break down the above scenario in terms of that cost in time. If you have 10 legal professionals you’re trying to hire, and it takes up to 7 days to complete the process for each individual person, that’s a lot of time spent writing and finalizing employment contracts.

All of that time could become a sunk cost if the new hire doesn’t work out for the firm. Companies spent over $92 billion on training new hires between 2020 and 2021, which is further compounded by employee turnover. You don’t want to invest all of those company resources to, first, draft employee contracts and, second, train and develop that new hire if they’re ultimately not the right fit for the firm.

This is why it’s important to have an automated process that allows you to create employment contracts faster and easier. With the right platform, you can have document assembly and creation like you’ve never seen before. This way, you can gain back some of those working hours spent creating documents and reinvest that time and resources back into the business. You can also devote more time towards vetting and qualifying prospects so that you get the best new hire to support your growing business needs.

No code injection increases accuracy and efficiency

Certain platforms provide code-free employment contract assembly solutions that make the process even easier for your teams. You can use these drag and drop solutions to draft advanced legal or employment contracts as fast as you need to get them out the door.

These platforms are intuitive, easy to use, and built with a user-friendly interface. You can create automated documents and legal forms that can be sent off to the right party instantly. Plus, you can even save previously written text blocks within the platform and drop them into new documentation as needed. This makes it easier to reproduce elements of the contract that are ubiquitous across all offers, further reducing time and energy required to draft new employment contracts. It’s a win-win all around!

Are you ready to inject a code-free employment contract creation process into your organization? Join the MinuteBox revolution so that you can earn back more of your own time as you continue to source, vet, qualify, and hire new professionals that will contribute to the future growth of your business.

Privacy protection and corporate security have never been so important to an organization’s well-being. Privacy protection laws like GDPR, CCPA, or PIPEDA impose significant financial penalties on companies that abuse or lose their customers’ personal data. Fines can be as large as 2 percent of all global annual revenue from the previous fiscal year.

As more personal and business data is stored on digital servers, enterprise security is paramount for companies to remain compliant with privacy protection laws. Enterprise security not only protects the personal information of individual customers, but it also provides internal and proprietary protection of business secrets and trademarks.

How COVID-19 accelerated the need for enterprise security

The movement towards greater privacy protection and corporate security has been ongoing for many years. Those movements have been further accelerated by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the rise in remote or work from home policies.

COVID-19 changed the way that people operate in their day to day lives, and more workers, including business owners or executives, are opting to work away from the office. Up to 77 percent of business owners admit they want to access more files remotely, increasing the demand for solutions that support enterprise security on a global scale.

As a result of work from home, more people are using personal computers, tablets, and smartphones to view corporate records and secure documents. Unfortunately, in some cases, people use virtual private networks (VPNs) to access these records, which are easier for hackers to penetrate. Should hackers be able to steal these documents or expose information that compromises the security of a business, that business could be liable for significant financial penalties.

How to use technology to ace enterprise security

As a law firm, your business is responsible for the corporate security of potentially hundreds of different clients. It’s imperative that you provide the convenience and quality of service that business owners expect (i.e., the ability to access files remotely) while still remaining compliant with privacy protection laws.

Entity management software is your best solution to address these growing demands. Cloud-based entity management platforms simplify the way law firms or corporate counsels manage their records and minute books.

They promote greater collaboration, efficiency, and ease of access to important corporate information. Most importantly, they provide end-to-end client security, including unlimited shares of corporate records and minute books as well as integrated e-signature capabilities. With these solutions, you can easily send and receive important documents for review or approvals.

Other benefits of cloud-based entity management solutions

The ability to send and receive minute books in a secure digital environment is the bedrock of what makes entity management platforms so compelling. But there are other benefits that will help your firm continue to provide exceptional service to clients.

Many firms only have a small group of cybersecurity experts at their disposal. Maintaining on-premise servers to protect client data and minute books is not only time consuming, but potentially dangerous.

In a survey of 450 companies early in the COVID-19 pandemic, two thirds admitted their on-premise servers were targeted by cyber hackers that risked exposing corporate information to the public. If your firm was one of those companies, are you confident that you have the cybersecurity experts who have bandwidth to maintain a protective barrier around client data?

Rather than take that risk, you can invest in a cloud-based entity management platform that stores all client data safely in the cloud behind password protected barriers of entry. Not only can your firm increase the security around your clients’ corporate records, but you’ll also improve your bottom line, streamline operations, and create economies of scale that help all legal professionals at your firm contribute to growth.

Ready to make the leap into cloud-based enterprise security? Join the MinuteBox revolution so that you can adapt to changing corporate demands and still provide the highest quality service to all of your clients.

As a business, every law firm is fundamentally trying to accomplish two goals:

1. Service the needs of existing clients to achieve satisfactory results
2. Attract new business to the firm and scale growth to new heights

Seems fairly straightforward, right? While most firms are very successful at goal #1, not as many are as consistently fortunate with goal #2. Part of that is simply due to the nature of the business; it’s simply not guaranteed that a new client case is available every single week that a firm can try to represent.

However, one of the main challenges to achieve scalable growth is that most firms have a limited amount of staff. There are only so many professional attorneys with trained clerks or paralegals to do all of the necessary tasks that will help grow the firm. In fact, employment statistics suggest the average firm in the United States has only 3 employees.

On top of that, most of these professionals must spend a sizable amount of time managing, storing, or updating minute book records and corporate documents. All of that work is necessary, but it does little to directly influence Legal Recurring Revenue for the firm.

Time is a luxury that law firms have little to spare

Given the fact that only a handful of professionals work in an average firm, time really is the great enemy for scalable ROI. There are only so many working hours in a day that can be used to prospect for new business, undergo introductory meetings with new clients, and arrange to review cases in greater detail.

All of those business acquisition tasks are compounded by the amount of time that’s necessary to properly manage minute books and corporate records. Due to each of these tasks and other priorities for legal professionals, the average legal professional bills clients just 2.5 hours out of an 8 hour working day.

When you break it down, it means only 31 percent of a working day is considered billable to boost Legal Recurring Revenue. That means 69 percent of any day in a firm is being spent on non-billable tasks that limit a firm’s potential for growth and prosperity.

Financial and labor costs of minute book recordkeeping

Before you can really take account of how much minute book recordkeeping can stretch your resources thin, it helps to break down the actual costs in crisp and clear terms. As they say, numbers don’t lie.

Let’s say your firm still keeps physical records of all minute book documents on location at the office. First of all, this is an expensive way to operate in 2022 since it costs firms up to $2,000 to store one single 5 drawer filing cabinet at the office. More importantly, physical documents are difficult to store and very time consuming to maintain.

With a limited number of clerks or paralegals in the office, it’s an inefficient use of time to physically review, store, or update records page by page. Companies spend up to $350 per record to file or source individual documents as well as reproduce any files that might be lost. That’s just the direct financial burden; it takes up to 5 minutes to scan, tag, and file individual documents within a corporate record. That’s 5 minutes for every file in each client minute book.

Implement innovative and efficient solutions to cut costs

So how do you reduce the number of non-billable daily hours so that you can grow the amount of time that can be billed towards clients? One of the best ways to do that is to reduce the amount of time and human resources devoted to minute book recordkeeping.

Technology has come a long way, and new breakthroughs provide law firms with cloud-based entity management platforms to digitize their minute book recordkeeping processes. Not only is this a faster and more efficient way to manage client minute books, but it also follows the trends that are shaping the industry.

In the 2020 Legal Trends Report, 89 percent of participating legal professionals cited technology as a resource to improve how legal firms operate. In the following year’s report, 79 percent of participating clients said they want the option to work remotely with their lawyers while still having the ability to access their minute books and corporate records.

Cloud-based entity management solutions offer that freedom and flexibility on both sides of the legal relationship. Firms can easily upload files into their platforms with speed and convenience, taking a significant chunk out of the time spent on recordkeeping. It also provides clients with the ability to do as they please and access records from a convenient location of their choosing.

Growth and ROI are important for any firm (any business, for that matter), and there are ways to increase opportunities to achieve those goals. All it takes is a little innovative spirit and an embrace of modern technology to help revolutionize the way your firm gets things done.

Is your firm ready to generate more ROI? Join the MinuteBox revolution so that you can modernize your minute book recordkeeping processes with cloud-based solutions that will cut costs, save valuable working capital, and help you reinvest those time savings into more billable hours charged to clients.

Let’s face facts; it’s very difficult for law firms to keep track of ledgers, records, and minute books for each one of their clients. With up to 77 percent of business owners preferring remote access to their corporate records, law firms must embrace innovative technology to provide the support that clients say they need.

One of the challenges facing many law firms is the lack of a cohesive, modern, and digital entity management strategy. Many firms strive to create a brand image as an innovative and efficient company. Relying on physical documents and outdated ledgers to manage client accounts reduces a firm’s brand perception as an innovative company.

Why physical ledgers and registers are so outdated

So what’s the underlying reason why physical ledgers and registers are so outdated? It all goes back to when the first printing press was invented in the 1400s, allowing European companies to document their receipts and expenses. When the typewriter was invented in the 1800s, it allowed some of that documentation to be delegated to the machine.

Unfortunately, progress on modernizing corporate ledgers and registers peaked with the invention of the typewriter. Since then, many firms continue to create ledgers that follow the designs created with the typewriter. At the time, this was very innovative; today, not so much.

For one thing, typewriters can’t do things like justify text. For example, on corporate records, it’s common practice to right justify numbers in columns. If typewriters are used to create those records, they don’t have the ability to make those adjustments to the text. This requires paralegals to either:

1. Manually write out the documentation OR
2. Sacrifice a professional looking document

The true cost of maintaining outdated recordkeeping

A paralegal’s time is very valuable for the firm. You can use your paralegals to increase billing hours to clients and contribute to sustainable Legal Recurring Revenue, provided they’re not losing time due to outdated recordkeeping. Manually managing all physical records is a time consuming process, eliminating time that could be spent on growing business for the firm.

It’s said that the average paralegal spends up to 5 minutes scanning, tagging, and filing a single document within a corporate record. Multiply that single document by the number of pages in that minute book. Time really adds up, doesn’t it.

At a time when innovation and efficiency are expected from clients, it casts a pall over a firm’s reputation to rely on outdated ledgers and physical recordkeeping. Firms limit their ability to increase Legal Recurring Revenue by sticking to these processes. On top of that, legal professionals who may be interested in joining the firm could be turned off by the idea upon learning of non-digitized record keeping processes.

The innovative approach to corporate record keeping

Your firm’s objective should be to establish a reputation as an innovative, efficient, and capable company that can provide a secure storage space for corporate records. To fulfill all of those client expectations, you need a modernized approach to maintaining those records.

That’s why successful law firms are embracing technology and utilizing entity management software to make record keeping more efficient. Using these types of solutions, all records can be stored in the cloud, eliminating the need for physical records drafted on typewriters and other outdated sources. Clients can also access their records using secure login information from any location, which is a growing trend in the post COVID-19 world.

The benefits of these types of solutions are also felt internally at the firm. You’ll be able to:

• Give your paralegal team more of their time to focus on driving revenue for the firm
• No longer wait for signatures from stakeholders; everyone can sign within the platform
• Attract new and quality legal talent to join your firm and help fuel growth

Modernization is the innovative, efficient, and smart way to manage corporate records and boost client satisfaction. Why continue to follow outdated processes?

Are you ready to make an innovative leap into the digital entity management space? Join the MinuteBox revolution so that you can increase efficiencies and attract new blood that will help grow your firm to greater success.