Benefits of the Cloud for Law Firms: A Single Version of the Truth

For attorneys, the cloud has quickly become an invaluable tool, increasing accessibility, affordability, security, and more while reducing the firm’s reliance on IT staff.

As we continue our series documenting the benefits of the cloud for law firms, we would today like to turn our attention to one of the biggest benefits of the cloud: Document control and a single version of the truth.

Your Truth, Their Truth…

For attorneys, law is based on an ever-evolving system of doctrine and precedent. It’s a beautiful evolution—a system of law that has evolved for centuries to bring you to where you are today. However, with systems of laws evolving in each state, you understand very well how different the law can be in each state.

That said, while each state’s laws may have evolved in different ways, your documents should have a straightforward process from draft to final document.

While collaboration may satisfy one part of the law firm’s needs, these people need to stay on the same page as well—collaboration means nothing if everyone in the firm is wasting time emailing a document, making edits, and emailing the document back. This is especially so when you have to bring together input from three, five, or dozens of attorneys working on dozens of different documents surrounding a matter.

One Truth: Why a Single Version of the Truth Saves Time

Whether you are preparing a brief or trying to compile time tracking to bill a client, the process of completing any document has long been a challenge. If two people are working on different versions of a document, the two documents are going to evolve in different ways, meaning that before anything can be finalized, all documents need to be reconciled.

This requires a single source of truth and a single version of truth—two interrelated terms that are necessary to data management, document control, and productivity. They are, however, two different terms, according to a Forbes article on the topic:

Single Source of Truth: A data storage principle to always source a particular piece of information from one place.
Single Version of Truth: One view of data that everyone in a company agrees is the real, trusted number for some operating data.

For law firms in need of increased productivity, accuracy, and profitability, both concepts are important.

How the Cloud Delivers

When you work with a cloud provider to host your legal applications, you not only empower everyone to work anytime and anywhere, you also enable multiple people to work on a document at the same time. All changes are tracked to create an audit trail, but one thing remains, everyone stays on the same page—all the time.

Flywire eliminates this threat through maintained document control. All files are stored centrally on our servers. Every employee sees one version of the true file. We can even adjust access to certain files for specific employees. You can customize exactly who has access to sensitive data. Edits and modifications are saved instantly, and those changes are reflected for every user. Get to know more about our work, the benefits of the cloud, and contact us for more information.