Stowe Family Law’s journey to more efficient document bundling

Stowe Family Law is the largest specialist team of family lawyers in the UK, with the mission to help families when they break down with care, empathy and respect. Since being founded in 1982, the firm has evolved and grown, now with a team of more than 80 leading divorce lawyers, including forensic accountants, a dedicated children law team, an adoption team, surrogacy law specialists and an international family law department.

The transition to digital was already in progress at the firm before the Covid-19 pandemic hit. Stowe Family Law had identified a need to address the time-consuming tasks involved with producing and managing large paper bundles of documents. However, the pandemic accelerated change at the firm. While several options were on trial, the firm chose Bundledocs, the secure, 100% cloud based solution with inhouse developer expertise.

Challenges

The handling of large and complex bundles of documents at Stowe Family Law required an agile solution to include templates, coding, indexing and OCR – a highly specific index layout and a numbering system that automatically reset for each section.

“It is essential that every bundle is fully indexed and searchable for the one keyword stipulation from the courts,” Maxine Jayes, Proclaim manager at Stowe Family, Law points out.

A bundle produced for the courts of up to 1500 pages may be duplicated three times, with the necessary binders and tabs. This process has been completely transformed with Bundledocs.

Decision-making criteria

A number of factors underpinned the decision to choose Bundledocs:

• Cloud based and not application based
• Efficient transfer of documents
• Developer integration into Eclipse Proclaim case management system
• Dedicated support
• Collaboration – with colleagues, Counsel, and co-workers to share, keep copies of drafts, work together on a final bundle, and access anytime
• Dynamic working

The Bundledocs solution allows a firm to create bundles from templates and prepare volumes or multi-sectioned bundles with the option to add document dates to the index and amend, if necessary, as well as creating customised templates to save even more time.

In making the transition to digital with Bundledocs, Stowe Family Law could now apply OCR to their e-bundles, making them fully text searchable, with the click of a button.

Benefits

Stowe Family Law highlighted some of the key benefits of working with Bundledocs:

• Huge reduction in the time taken to produce bundles
• Significant savings in time, money, and paper
• Accessibility
• Secure document sharing
• Collaboration
• Support

For example, in preparation for a final hearing, it previously took between one to two hours to produce complex bundles that now take 20 minutes, a reduction of between 30% and 60%.

Bundledocs is fully automatic, meaning that Stowe Family Law can now manage high-volume document cases efficiently. Every bundle is automatically numbered, indexed, hyperlinked, and bookmarked for easy access.

In terms of managing confidential information: the firm can quickly and easily apply redactions directly onto any document allowing them to completely remove sensitive data before sharing or printing a bundle.

Support

“The support provided by Bundledocs was crucial at a very challenging time in the transition from paper bundles to electronic bundles, and at an accelerated pace due to the pandemic.”

Maxine Jayes continues: “The Bundledocs team is hugely supportive, putting us as a business first. They helped us with everything from start to finish providing excellent technical assistance. Bundledocs training videos were also very useful for the team of lawyers and staff here.”

“In relation to training for the team at Stowe Family Law, and the process of learning a new system within a busy practice, the transition was very smooth due to the user-friendly nature of the Bundledocs solution. New user training was available while one-to-one support was very effective, supporting legal assistants who were under time pressure.”

Benefits to clients

Maxine Jayes from Stowe Family Law highlights the benefits to clients: “Our clients prefer this new system of e-bundles. It saves them time too. The process of sending preliminary documents to clients for approval is much easier – one pdf that they can access securely from anywhere. We are providing a sustainable solution that clients are happy with.”

The transition to digital with Bundledocs has created a dynamic way of working at Stowe Family Law, enhancing the way the firm helps their clients.

Court-compliant E-Bundles

The Judiciary recently released new guidance on the preparation of electronic court bundles. These new requirements are now in place and replace the previous revision published in May 2020. Bundledocs is fully compliant with these new requirements.

The new guidance was published to ensure a level of consistency for producing electronic bundles (e-bundles) for court hearings.

Bundledocs is developed in three-week development sprints allowing the company to quickly and easily meet new requirements.

If your firm is interested in speaking to a member of the Bundledocs team: https://www.bundledocs.com/features