Legal Technology Journal

30 October 2008, London - LexisNexis, the leading provider of Practice & Productivity Management solutions, announces that Lambeth Council and Derby City Council will be the first two organisations to deploy Document Bundling, its innovative new offering, officially launched in the UK today.

These Councils have chosen Document Bundling over all other competing products in the market following a rigorous review of the solution by potential users. The software has been selected for its ease of use, flexibility, functionality and easy integration with their Visualfiles case management systems.

Document Bundling allows users to create electronic bundles and automate the document bundle production process. It is built to work alongside the current Visualfiles case management system and solves two principal challenges - importing and collation of large volumes of relevant documents into a bundle; and formatting, indexing and page numbering bundles for printing and electronic presentation. This solution will facilitate quality control by ensuring that the court bundles created by these Councils adhere to the strict court guidelines and deliver immediate time and cost efficiencies to their legal departments.

Given the volume of legal cases handled by these Councils, developing court bundles is an important but extremely time consuming activity. To illustrate, within the social services practice area alone, Derby City Council deals with approximately 65 cases per annum and for each case bundle of 1,050 pages creates up to three bundle updates prior to court hearings. The Council is looking at 204,750 pages that have to be scanned, split into bundle volumes, formatted, indexed and paginated.

Similarly, at Lambeth Council, the employment legal practice currently deals with 35 cases per annum and for each case creates five separate bundles prior to every court hearing. As a result, the Council produces 175 court bundles every year. This means that these Councils have to make a reasonably large investment to ensure secure physical storage as well as easy access to these documents.

Both Councils were therefore looking to deploy technology that would simplify the creation and secure storage of their court bundles in electronic format and deliver a greater return on their technology investment.

Gerard Kamath, Business Manager of Legal Services at Lambeth Council, commented, "We have recently implemented new ways of working and a growing number of our staff are now working remotely, thus requiring access to information stored online. For a while now we have been keen to implement a court bundling solution that integrates with our case management system and case history, to make it easy for our lawyers to create accurate and consistent bundles.

"We have seen many bundling options, but this is the most sophisticated and robust. It will facilitate increased efficiency and quality control, whilst offering tremendous flexibility. We are looking forward to this implementation."

Councillor Mike Carr, Cabinet Member for Direct and Internal Services at Derby City Council, added, "We have received excellent feedback from our legal division. It will facilitate a significant positive change in the working practices, allowing significant time saving and departmental efficiency. We have their complete buy-in on this investment."

From a functionality perspective, users at Lambeth Council were impressed by the solution's ability to allow them to rename and re-date bulk scanned documents. In addition, they found the automatic page numbering function was a key benefit as it will make it very easy for legal assistants to build bundles quickly and accurately, especially when new documents are added or existing ones re-ordered within the bundles.

Similarly, legal assistants and administrators at Derby City Council were impressed by the software's ability to allow them to create bundles from history categories. This means that they will be able to slot documents into bundle sections as part of their routine workflow, thereby developing bundles well in advance and as a matter of course.

Tim Cheadle, UK General Manager, LexisNexis Practice & Productivity Management, said, "Developing court bundles is a real business issue for legal departments. We have developed this offering expressly to help legal practices within local authorities and private legal firms overcome the frustration of manually producing these large volumes of case-relevant documentation into bundles, whilst all the time ensuring strict quality control.

"We are encouraged by the overwhelmingly positive response Document Bundling has received from the industry."