Delphi is one of Sweden’s top commercial law firms. They advise on mergers, acquisitions and, more specifically, matters of banking, finance and capital markets. Their specialty lies within high-tech fields such as IT, intellectual property and life science. The firm’s work spans the globe, thanks to clients in Scandinavia, Europe, and North America. They also co-operate with law firms globally and regularly assist clients on international matters. Delphi has offices in Stockholm, Göteborg, Malmö, Linköping, and Norrköping.
The Problem
Closing Books, also known as Deal Books or Matter Bibles, is a key value add-on service for clients
of law firms. The standard program creates a collated set of documents relating to a case or specific
matter to be given to the client. The same is done to Court or Trial Bundles, enabling a judge to
possess all relevant case documents. The problem with these standard industry document binders,
however, is that their production is very costly and time-consuming for the law firm involved.
Take Delphi, for example, who regularly need to create Closing Books and Court Bundles across
their many offices. Up to three people can be assigned to a single project, in which each document
of hundreds or even thousands of pages is individually converted to PDF. These PDFs then need
to be merged into a single file with the addition of a Table of Contents manually exported in from
Microsoft Word.
To save time and money, Delphi needed to simplify and speed up the process of creating a single
electronic binder. Delphi's Head of IT, Henrik Jarnberg, spoke with other legal IT Managers in
Sweden who recommended pdfDocs from DocsCorp to minimize the effort of creating electronic
binders.
DocsCorp is a global provider of productivity software for law firms. Its software portfolio includes
metadata cleaning, document comparison as well as PDF creation and editing. The pdfDocs
product provides law firms with all the tools needed to manage legal workflows including collation,
redaction, OCR conversion and electronic binder creation.
The Binder functionality in pdfDocs automates the process of converting large volumes of
documents to a single, or multi-PDF document, complete with bookmarks, links, Table of Contents
and a cover page. The contents of the electronic binder are also fully text-searchable.
The Solution
The firm ran a pilot to test the software with the secretarial staff and assistants who were previously
charged with creating the electronic binders.
The ROI from pdfDocs Binder was immediate and impressive. Creating an electronic binder was now
75% faster and required only one person to oversee the project. According to Henrik, "the cost of
purchasing pdfDocs was recouped after the first electronic binder was created."
Delphi staff simply add documents and folders – including those with sub-folders – from their
local drive, network or iManage Work DMS into a Binder Project. The documents can then be rearranged
within the Binder Project with drag-and-drop ease. The electronic binder can be branded
with the firm's logo and stationery sets to ensure they look professional and a Word document can
be promoted as a cover page. Watermarks, headers and footers, time/date stamping can also be
inserted while security settings may also be applied if necessary.
Generating the electronic binder is done in a single click. This step automatically converts all
the documents in the Binder to PDFs, generating a printable Table of Contents, cross-document
bookmarks, links, and an auto-launch file (if copying the final Binder to DVD or flash drive). The
Binder can be output as a single PDF Binder or as a multiple PDF Binder.
For Henrik and his team, the binder capability has been transformative. "To use a farming analogy,
we have moved from ploughing the land with a horse to ploughing it with a tractor. Creating
electronic binders is now a routine task at the firm, not a massive undertaking. "
Other Benefits
One of the key requirements from Delphi at the outset was integration with iManage Work,
something pdfDocs does with no set-up required. This convenient integration meant that Delphi
staff could save the electronic binder directly into iManage. Henrik remarked that the electronic
binder could also be uploaded to a data room as it was collated, searchable and easily navigated.
Another benefit of the integration was a smarter workflow for creating and emailing PDF documents
from iManage. pdfDocs eradicates the need to create temporary files, saving users a lot of time in
the process.
Delphi enjoyed a full range of benefits from pdfDocs, including:
Redaction – the pdfDocs redaction tool let Delphi staff electronically remove private or confidential
information from PDF documents quickly and easily.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) – pdfDocs comes with OCR capability to convert PDF to
Word documents. Henrik noted that this feature "has been very useful, particularly when we needed
to edit a document but couldn't locate the original. Or, when we had a paper document that we
didn't want to retype. Instead, we simply scanned the document and converted it to Word using pdfDocs.”
The Summary
The time-consuming and costly exercise of manually creating electronic Closing Books and Court
Bundles led one of Sweden's top commercial law firms, Delphi, to look for an alternative method of
creating this value add-on service with efficiency. pdfDocs from DocsCorp ticked all the boxes with
features including automated electronic binder generation; integration with iManage Work; PDF
redaction workflows and robust OCR capability. The firm now produces electronic binders in hours
not days, and by one person instead of three. The experience has been truly transformative.