6 Useful Tools To Help You Organize Your Legal Documents

Whether you’re working in the legal industry or just trying to get some legal documents sorted, there will be a range of tools out there that you can use to help them effectively. It’s important that you not only know where your legal documents are, but that you can access them with ease, and find specific pages when needed, too! Let’s take a look at six useful tools that could help you organize your legal documents.

PDF Management Tools

It doesn’t matter who you are, it is more than likely that you will have to work with PDFs in some form eventually. That’s the case for legal experts as well as the general member of the public. PDF documents are common within the legal industry, as they can be easily sent over, amended with comments, and converted to a range of different forms.

Perhaps the biggest strength of a PDF is that it can be used with electronic signature tools. As you can imagine, this is incredibly useful for legal usage. There are many PDF tools that you can use, with one of the most popular coming in the form of Adobe Acrobat Pro. This tool allows a user to create, edit, and manage PDF documents.

There are also features that allow you to remove sensitive information, further adding to the reasons that PDFs are prevalent in the legal world. If you have many PDFs on hand, then you may find that your storage space is filling up quickly. Fortunately, there are PDF-friendly tools out there that can assist with this. You can use an online PDF compressor tool that can save your physical and cloud-based storage.

Cloud Storage Tools

Speaking of cloud-based storage, you should ensure you are using cloud storage tools to help organize and manage your legal documents. You shouldn’t just rely on using your physical storage for a number of reasons. For one, utilizing cloud storage allows you to have backups just in case you were to lose the primary copy. Documents may end up corrupting, so having backups and different versions saves you from losing everything.

Of course, one of the primary reasons you should be using cloud storage is to save you from using your physical storage. If you fill up and clog up your physical storage, then you may end up actually slowing down your device. In the long run, this could actually cause some damage to your device, which is far from ideal.

There are many different types of cloud storage options out there. You have more than likely heard of many of these, some of which you should consider trying. Popular ones include Dropbox, which is used by businesses, professionals, students and general people alike! Most cloud storage tools will have free plans and premium plans that you can upgrade to.

Legal Document Management Tools

When it comes to legal documents, you should be making use of specific tools that are built and designed for legal documents. For example, there are tools that allow legal professionals to create and manage specific documents. Some of these tools will not just allow you to create and write documents but will also allow you to incorporate document indexing and tracking.

Legal professionals will take care with each word in a document and thus will want to ensure they can easily search a document and go through the index to find certain bits. Certain tools will also allow legal professionals to tag documents, which allows them to search through mass folders of thousands of documents to find the exact one they need.

Essentially, there are many different legal document management tools out there that you can make use of to help manage legal documents, whether you are a legal profession or just someone who wants to organize your legal documents.

Project Management Tools

Project management tools can also be used to help you organize and manage your legal documents effectively. These tools will be especially helpful for legal projects that someone is undergoing, but they could be useful for organizing documents and legal files in general.

Project management tools allow you to use boards and create lists to create a more helpful visual representation of tasks and documents that need sorting. This would allow you to easily organize files, and prioritize legal documents in any way you see fit.

Some tools will allow you to add labels and dates that can help you add key information to your legal documents. If you are working within a team, or need a legal expert to look at your files, then these tools will be ideal for collaborating together, so that everyone can edit and view documents.

Scanning Tools And Apps

Legal professionals such as lawyers will be knowledgeable when it comes to the need to scan documents. Scanning physical documents to make them online is useful, as it removes the need to do this by hand, and transcribe. Not only will this help legal experts to get physical documents into their computers, but it also helps send documents to clients and other firms.

Nowadays, while physical scanners still exist, there are apps and tools that allow you to do this without the need for a big device. Depending on what phone you have and what operating software you have, various apps will allow you to quickly snap a picture of a document and scan it to your desktop.

Document Management System

Lastly, you will benefit from some sort of document management system to help you organize and manage your documents! It sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised at how many people don’t have a dedicated management system for their documents, and instead just use their folders and basic computer file system, which can be a big mess.

You will find document management systems provided by Google and Microsoft for your devices and third-party providers. You will also find document management software designed for law firms specifically, which could be an added bonus.

It’s worth trying a few, perhaps through some free trials, to see if it works for you, either in a professional capacity or a personal one. That goes for all the tools we’ve mentioned on this list really, and remember, what works for one may not work for you!