Using IT when preparing material for court
There are times when you will be preparing an electronic filing of applications which you want dealt with without a hearing. Guidance on how to file such applications are explored in the Commercial Court Guide and layout stringent rules for how the material should be presented. Compliance with these requirements can demand much administration by a law firm. If not complied with, the burden of work falls to the judge and the supporting staff. This could lead to your application being rejected.
The requirements
When presenting evidence for consideration without a hearing, you need to provide all relevant documents as a single filing. You then need to properly label this evidence, so that the relevant material can easily be found and examined. Although specific evidence can be sent as PDFs, others, such as the application itself, should be submitted in Word format, so that it can be amended as necessary.
Evidence in emails and attachments
A particular challenge arises when the evidence is stored in an email account. Here, both the email and its attachment could be relevant to the proceedings and therefore needs collating and labelling.
There are software packages that allow law firms to convert Outlook emails to a single PDF. Such packages will not only retrieve the email but also convert the attachment to PDF too. Equally, if you need to view these files in another email format, then it can be converted to EML, which is a universal email application.
Such applications allow you to retain the quality of the original documents while allowing you to add text to pages and so labelling them effectively. You can also rename each file so that when submitted to the court, the evidence is easy to search.
Serval Solutions would be happy to advise on the sort of applications that could ease the gathering of evidence from email accounts.
Graphical evidence
You may also hold many images that need to be organised and catalogued. The sending of such large amounts of information graphically may present filing issues. Therefore, you may also want to consider an application that can convert multiple graphical formats, including JPEG and PNG and turn these into a PDF. Such converters can take numerous images and collate these together into a single document.
The PDF will not only retain the quality of the original image and make it easier to print. It will also allow you to label the pictures and make this searchable for the recipient.
Always a package to help
Contact Serval Solutions for help and support in selecting and sourcing the best applications for the collation of evidence. Not only can such software ease workflow within a busy legal office, but also ensure that the application proceeds without interruption.
Also, contact Serval Solutions to help with the security of this evidence. Your client’s right to confidentiality should not be compromised in the collation or submission of such evidence to the courts. Therefore, you will need to know what software is available for the encryption of data before sending over the internet.