To Paper or Not To Paper: Going Paperless With HowNow (part 4)

This article is one of a series of articles on going paperless with HowNow. Click here to read part 5 of this series. To read the rest of the articles, head to the Paperless category.

Symptom: You have more folders on your computer than hairs on your head

The use of folders in Windows Explorer is an attempt to filter views of documents so that you can see, for example, only documents that relate to a particular job, year or matter. This results in the ‘pick a folder, pick a folder, pick a folder’ search that wastes time and often proves fruitless. What if you saved it into the wrong folder? Under the wrong client? You might be able to find it, but is it worth time it will take? There is no ‘One Place’ to store the firm’s procedures, templates, emails, correspondence and other records. Fragmented storage and record keeping means there’s no way a person can see the complete picture of documents, correspondence and records that relate to a particular client. Frustrating? You would know.

Solution

Even though HowNow saves files to your desired folder structure behind the scenes, you can display on the one HowNow screen the contents of any or all folders for a client or topic. You can then filter your view in a variety of ways, which is much more flexible than using folders as filters. Click on your name. Click a date range. There’s everything you saved, no matter ‘where’ it is on the system. You could even filter further, on document type (email, Excel, PDF, Word, etc.) or by typing a keyword. HowNow provides the ‘One Place’ for electronic storage and retrieval for the entire firm. This makes it easy to see the full picture of documents and records that relate to a particular client or team member, regardless of who filed the documents. The entire system is just a click away.