The basics of Disclosure Ready – key features and uses

Hello everybody, my name’s Stephen Foley and I’ve got with me today Peter Avram, our CTO from Legal Ready. We’re going to show you the new features in the Disclosure Ready product. We’re going to walk you through the new features in the product so that you can easily see how this is actually going to work in practise. There are the three main items we’re going to be addressing in this new product. The main areas are being able to upload your documents more easily from your clients into the system to be able to process those documents using some AI technology we’ve developed and then a much easier process in terms of disclosure itself. We’re going to go through how you do this and because those who’ve already used our other product eBrief Ready, most of the look and feel will be similar, but there are some significant differences in terms of the processing of documents and disclosing documents.

So let’s first go into the product and walk you through it. We’re in Disclosure Ready now, and you’ll see that it does look very much like eBrief Ready in terms of the layout, but we’ll walk you through how we create a new matter on the product. Up in the top right hand corner as usual, it’s just new matter and Peter’s just going to call it party A versus party B. This is where you would put your party name in. The name of your client we believe would be there. We’re just going to call this party A and that’s all you need to do, and you can create the matter now by just hitting the save button. You’ll see on the right hand side you’ve got your party. By clicking on your party you’ll see that Peter Avram is the owner of the party A, but he can also create another party by clicking on the plus key, and he is going to create party B using me as party B.

In this particular example, he’s just going to put in my email address, which is sitting just underneath. I’m going to be invited now into party B. One of the main things to know about this is that there can only be one person he can invite from the other party. He can invite as many people as he likes into party A, and he’ll invite a client in a moment to party A. But in party B, he can only invite the one owner for party B. And that person obviously can invite more members into their party. So that gets our parties up and running if you like. Now we can add some documents to the system. For Party A, he’s just going to add some documents. These are his documents that are going into the system here. Of course, party B doesn’t get to see any of these documents. These are just party A’s documents going onto the system and they’re going to be loaded into those different folders.

You’ll see at the moment the index at the top has the documents going in to the different folders. These take just a few minutes to go into the system. The documents are now being completed and on the system. We are able to disclose some of these documents to the other side. If Peter was to go down say into ‘Property’, he could disclose all those documents by ticking the top box, but he can also just select a couple of documents if he wanted to. Let’s select a couple of documents there. For the three documents he’s going to disclose you’ll see the disclose option down the bottom there. He’s going to click disclose and it’s going to confirm ‘do you really want to disclose these three documents And he’s going to go, yep, I’m going to do that. You’ll see that when we look at the property, reload that screen now the three documents have been disclosed that he puts his mouse over there, it’ll show when they were disclosed and at what time. Now if we go across to the other matter where he shared it with party B, which is the other matter, you’ll see that those documents now just going to open that up.

I’m signed in as Stephen now rather than Peter. So I’m now party B for this view.

And if we go down the bottom, you’ll see that there’s a disclosure history now letting us know that those three documents have been disclosed and it’s got the date and time and who did it. And also you’ll see that they’re in your inbox down the bottom there. You can then drag those documents by clicking on inbox, tag them and move them to the folders that you want to move them into in terms of your matter on your side. So Peter’s just going to move those across into party B, party A. So now the three documents I’m going to show in Party B’s matter and also the disclosure histories there on the screen when they were disclosed. That’s the first part in terms of the process of disclosure and vice versa, we’d uploaded documents into this matter for party B and we disclosed the documents – they would also flow back into party A. You can see how this process makes it very simple to disclose documents and there can be no ambiguity about when documents are disclosed or what time they’re disclosed because they go from one side to the other and the dates and times are recorded. Let’s look at how we might process bank statements too, just to show how the automation works.

I’ll jump back to my account now and I’ll be adding some documents into the bank accounts and the credit cards field. Okay, I’m going to add documents In this instance, I’m going to assign them all into one folder rather than letting the system try to figure it out, I’m going to choose bank accounts and I’ve got some example ANZ bank account files just in here. They could be anything. They don’t need any names or identifiers. There’s nothing special about those names in there. It imports them as the files are provided into the bank accounts folder. While that’s processing, we’ll just show that. Now that’s processing within the bank accounts folder. I might add some credit card statements as well. I have some Amex documents in that folder is July and August one, and I’ll just put them straight into the credit cards folder there. Now we’ll see those documents are all currently processing. Again, this will take a few minutes and we’ll see what happens. You’ll see once they’ve finished processing, the AI processing has identified the bank account name and the date range for each of the files within the credit card statements and has put some additional information as well with the credit card and bank account statements I should say. If we have a look, we can see with the statements under edit document, you can see a few bit of the information that it’s pulled out and see it’s got the opening balance and the closing balance for these statements.

One nice feature that this knowing the balances can give you is that you can set up some flags to try to identify documents that might have some large changes in amounts for the opening and closing statements. You can go into the folder setup, drill down to the folder that corresponds with the account you’re interested in. You can edit the folder and put in a sum that you might be interested in knowing when the balance has swung significantly. I’m just going to put $10,000 in there. And if we go back to our documents, we can see that one of these statements has quite significant changes in the funds. You can hover on the flag to get a bit of an explanation as to why there was that flag brought up. And in this case it shows that the opening balance and the closing balance exceeds the threshold that I put in just a moment ago. So that might be a useful bit of information for you to track down.

If a bank statement doesn’t get processed, then you’ll see that it still will just remain in the bank accounts folder and you’ll have to process that manually yourself rather than the AI doing it. If you ever see that there’s things still stuck in the bank accounts or credit cards, that will mean that you’ll need to edit them and make the changes yourself.

If you accidentally add the wrong type of document, it will process but obviously not automatically place it into the credit card statement. You’ll know that if this was actually a credit card or bank account statement, you may need to perform some manual processing listings.

It is also worth showing when we do disclose documents, what email gets sent out to all the parties.

If you recall, I disclosed earlier.

This is the email everybody will get when the disclosure happens, each side will get this email and even the person who disclosed will get this email so that everybody knows when it happened and what documents were disclosed. We’ll now show how we can invite a client into the matter so that they can upload documents.

Back to my brief, I’ll share my matters. And in the same way that you would invite another user, say within your firm, you use the share alligators and you type in this instance, we’re inviting a client, so a client email address, you’d mark them as a client.

And there’s a couple of things to note here. When you invite them as a client, you can invite them as a full user or a regular user. If you invite them as a full user, then they’ll be able to upload the documents into the different folders like bank statements or credit card statements or property. If you invite them only as a regular user, then it’ll just go into an inbox. So it’s up to you at what level you want the user to be able to upload documents, irrespective of whether you give them full user or regular user permissions, they’ll never be able to disclose. Only the solicitors can disclose in the system and paralegals, if it’s a client, they will never be able to disclose documents on the system. And then you’ve got two types of invitation you can send them, can send them an invitation by email and we’ll do that for this example. But you could also display a copyable link and this is a link that you could embed in an email you send out to them with whatever you want to say. And then the link will just be a link to be able to view the matter. It’s up to you which way you want to do, but we’ll just send an invitation by email and use regular as the client. Peter will share that now.

And as you’ll see now, if he looks at the two parties, the members of the two parties over there under this party, party A, it’ll have him and also the client that’s as a regular user on this has their permissions and Party B still just has the one user. If party B has more users than one, it won’t list all the other users. It’ll just tell you there’s two or three other members to that party.

Looking at this matter from Party B’s perspective. If we pull up the matters, we can show the members of parties, and in party A, it will only show you the owners of the other party. Obviously if there’s a reason that you might need to contact them, you need to know who the owners of this other party are, but there’s no reason for you to know the names or email addresses of the other members, and there’s no reason that they would need to know the names and email addresses of the other non-owner members of your party.

We’ll now have a look at what the example of the email that was sent out to the client. So there’s an example of the email the client would get. Now the text around this email is absolutely up to you what you want to have there. This is just an example of text that you might want to be sending to the client. And as I mentioned before, if you want to have a customisable one for a particular client, you don’t even have to use your standard template. You could create a customisable one that you’ve created yourself and you would just send out the link that copy link that we were showing before. So once that happens then your client will be able to upload documents on the system?

Peter is just logging in now as the client, and they can obviously just see the matters that are involved with. There’s only one and they can now add documents. If they come over and click add documents to this matter they’ll see obviously the documents in here already. And if they just go up to click add documents at the top, you’ll see that they don’t have all the different folders because we’ve set them up as a regular client, which means that they just get to add documents, but those documents will just go into the inbox. So no, you’re not giving many choice about what folder to put them into. If you’d made them a full user, they would’ve been able to select the folders that to put the documents in. So it’s up to you what level of permissions you want to give. So when these documents get uploaded now, they’ll just go into the inbox down the bottom left hand side there, document inbox, and once they get processed you’ll be able to move those documents into the right folder. Of course, this client can’t do that, they haven’t got the ability to move documents because they’re just a regular user on the system. But when you log in, you’ll see the inbox and again, everybody will be notified that these documents have been uploaded onto the system. And indeed, in the upload history down the bottom, look at the upload history there, you’ll see that those five documents have just been uploaded and it’ll say who uploaded them for you. So there’s a full history there on the system.

That covers off what we want to cover in this training, to show you the main differences in the product of eBrief Ready and where the ability to make it much simpler for you disclose information to be able to run the process through AI led technology and to simplify the uploading of documents. Of course, if you’ve got any more questions, we’ll be running more sessions that we can ask more detailed questions and hopefully that gives you a good enough overview. Thanks for your time.