Eclipse Proclaim has become the leading digital case management system for Solicitors in England and Wales.  The desire for a paperless office solution has become increasingly appealing and sought after for many law firms in light of reduced profit margins and increased overheads brought about by ongoing changes in the legal market.  Shockingly however according to a survey by YouGov, in the UK SMEs still waste more than £42.2 million per day in revenues looking for documents. More alarming statistics brought to light by the survey were that;

• 92% of managers and directors surveyed waste time searching for paperwork each working day, with 80% losing up to an hour per day.
• Less than 25% of companies have a document management system in their company.
• A mere 7% of SMEs have a predominantly paperless office.

Many law firms do not realise that the time spent trying to find documents and collating data costs them dearly and is detrimental to their business development. The direct and indirect benefits to having a paperless office environment solution such as the law society accredited case management solution Eclipse Proclaim should not be understated, here are some of the top reasons;

With Eclipse Proclaim it is no longer necessary to waste time looking for documents. All document searches can be done rapidly and results are obtained in seconds. All the documents are stored on a central server so there is no danger of misplacing any documentation. With all the time you will save using Eclipse Proclaim to cut down on admin tasks executives can spend their time more productively, on developing the business and generating revenue. Read more here.

Using Eclipse Proclaim as your digital document management system provides you with a fully searchable, central document library and knowledge / precedent store. Furthermore, post can be scanned and stored digitally within the relevant cases. As well as the obvious time savings this brings it also increases your available office real estate when you realise you can remove paper focused assets such as filing cabinets.

Need to find out who changed a document and when? Whether the fee earner did obtain those court orders in time? Or how many Part 36 Offers have been obtained in the last 7 days? With the right development Eclipse Proclaim can assist in comprehensive auditing of all of this and more. You can also benefit from the ability to make changes to documents and still keep the original, helping with compliance and audit guidelines.

When using Eclipse Proclaim to implement a paperless office it will afford you the functionality to assist in Cost Budgeting and Cost Management by providing ongoing alerts and colour-coding for each element of the budget. Summary screens to showcase only relevant costs information ‘at-a-glance’ for fee earners and management. Crucially reporting and analysis across all budget categories on an individual cases or firm wide basis.

A paperless system supported by Eclipse Proclaim allows for a completely customisable reporting suite which can be used to drill down into cases allowing for clinical levels of data interrogation. Reports can even be scheduled to auto-run at set times / dates and be distributed to pre-defined contacts or shared locations. Read more here.

For many of our clients while they are initially happy with the “out-of-the-box” system that Eclipse Proclaim delivers they become quickly aware that to reap the benefits of a fully paperless office they need additional help tailoring the system to their own bespoke needs.Expecting the default Eclipse Proclaim system to meet your businesses needs is akin to purchasing opening a new excel spreadsheet and expecting it to come with a working Profit and Loss system complete with all of your firm’s information. Eclipse Proclaim gives you the tools to maximise your paperless office environment but you need someone who knows how to use those tools, that’s where we come in.

Should you wish to learn more about Proclaim development or request a free consultation please contact our Legal IT Director James Denby via James.Denby@legalpracticesupport.co.uk