• by Carly Mellon
If you have never been involved in legal proceeding, you may not know that most lawyers and legal staff bill for their time by the hour. Billable tasks typically include drafting documents, legal research, correspondence, and organizing client files. Going through every document, opening it up, renaming it, converting it to PDF, and organizing it properly in your file can take a long time, and that time is billed. Legal proceedings can become very expensive, and this is one area where you have control to minimize your legal fees.
Here are the top 5 reasons why providing organized disclosure to your lawyer is important.
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Easy to Find Emails
Lawyers and their assistants receive many emails throughout the day and do their best to keep track and keep everything organized. The easiest way to keep track of emails is having a simple, consistent subject line such as “Smith – financial disclosure” or “Smith – banking”. Both examples let us know what you have sent, which tells us how to organize it in your file. Having a consistent subject line and being able to search your name or a specific term (such as “banking”), can help us find your email if it gets lost between other emails, as well as saves time and avoids the need to request something again.
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Keeping Track of Documents
Renaming every document can be tedious and may seem pointless. However, if everything is named clearly and accurately it is easier for us to make sure everything has been received and we can quickly organize it in your file in the appropriate folders. It also makes it quicker to determine what is outstanding so we can inform you right away what you still need to send. Your lawyer wants to ensure your file is complete with every relevant document.
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Eliminate the Risk of Altering Documents
It is important to convert Word documents or JPEG images into PDF format before emailing the document to us. A quick right-click and ‘convert to PDF’ will do the trick. We do not want to accidentally manipulate anything you send us and receiving documents as PDFs eliminates this risk.
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Streamlines the Process
In order to complete your financial statement, one of the first steps in most family law proceedings, we need to have all of the required financial disclosure. Having it be sent to us in an organized manner, per our naming instructions, allows us to get started on drafting that form. Best case scenario is we receive all your financial disclosure in PDF format and proper naming format, and the drafting of your financial statement goes off without a hitch!
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Time is Money
If you have never been involved in legal proceeding, you may not know that some lawyers bill for their time by the hour. Billable tasks typically include drafting documents, legal research, correspondence, and organizing client files. Going through every document, opening it up, renaming it, converting it to PDF, and organizing it properly in your file can take a long time, and that time is billed. Legal proceedings can become very expensive, and this is one area where you have control to minimize your legal fees.
Please reach out to any of the staff at Frenkel Tobin if you have any questions pertaining to financial disclosure, or if you need further clarification on how to name and save your documents.