One Legal
Innovating to Help Litigators Conquer the "Paper Mountain"

When people think of law offices they tend to visualize one thing: stacks of paper. In civil lawsuits, filings must be made to the court, defendants served, and documents exchanged throughout the trial. The result is that complex cases can easily run to thousands of pages, and even a typical case may run to several hundred.

All that paper is problematic. Not only is it costly and time consuming to print, collate and distribute all of the documents, there is also a time lag between sending and receipt, a risk of mistakes and delays, and an administrative burden created by the need for scanning and storage.

One Legal is at the forefront of using technology to help law firms to get a grip on the “paper mountain” and markedly increase the efficiency of their litigation operations. The California-based company, which began as the pioneer of fax filing in the 1990s, has recently been harnessing the tech talent around its Bay Area home to develop their litigation support services into a comprehensive Software as a Service (SaaS) platform.

The courts are moving slowly towards eFiling, resulting in a complex mixture of physical-only and eFiling courts. Fortunately for law firms, One Legal– uniquely–offers a single portal for filing and serving, whether to an eFiling court or one still on the more traditional paper path. “Our fulfillment team uses their years of experience to ensure that, wherever our customers are filing, we quickly and accurately get their documents accepted,” says Vice President & GM, Noah Aron. The company’s experience shows: in San Francisco, for example, 99 percent of all its filings are accepted first time.

The firm also offers process serving alongside its filing solution–allowing for seamless filing and serving in a single transaction. “We have a strong commitment to a premium standard of service,” says company President Robert DeFilippis, adding “we’ve spent considerable time quality-checking our supply chain and building a custom system that allows us to process, monitor, and deliver quality results.” The result is industry-leading 24/7 customer access to ordering or status updates and rapid delivery of proof of service, all crucial features for busy attorneys.

For complex cases, where there may be a constantly evolving list of parties, One Legal has developed CaseLink.

An easily accessible online tool, CaseLink allows for serving of all parties at the touch of a button and collates all of the case’s filed-endorsed papers for all participants to view and download. Crucially, the platform manages each case’s service list–removing a key headache for legal representatives in these cases where parties may constantly be added to, or removed from, the suit.

One Legal is at the forefront of using technology to help law firms to get a grip on the ‘paper mountain’ and markedly increase the efficiency of their litigation operations

One Legal is the official platform for the filing of complex construction cases in San Diego and CaseLink can also be used in many other courts cases under a case management order (CMO). The efficiencies firms have achieved through the use of CaseLink in San Diego have been substantial. Director of Product, Jonathan Rosen says, “our San Diego clients report substantial time savings from having all case documents inside a single system. For a firm working on perhaps five or ten cases at a time, those time savings really add up.”

“This is an exciting time to be in legal technology,” concludes Rosen. “At One Legal we’re combining 25 years of experience successfully filing and serving with the latest technology to really disrupt the paper-intensive law office, streamline the litigation process, and bring massive efficiencies to the sector.”