When we talk about inheritance within a cloud service, we’re not discussing wills and successions (although those have many perks as well). Instead, we are referencing new features and benefits that lawyers, law firms, and legal departments get to enjoy, continually and automatically through their NetDocuments service. Simply put, if and when NetDocuments makes updates to its service, all customers receive the update at once – so whether you’re a 5 user firm, 1,000 user firm, or part of a large corporate legal department – you will always enjoy the most up-to-date enhancements.
Back in the CD-ROM days, when your business needed software, you purchased disks of the latest edition and hoped it stayed functional for as long as your team needed it. After a couple years, however, it would be time to update, and you’d have to purchase a new edition of the software with no guarantee that your experience transferring from one version to the next would be easy. Today, many organizations experience similar operational issues with on-premises software.
A key benefit of inheritance that comes with a cloud-based software like NetDocuments is automatic updates. As the platform improves through continual releases of updates, bug fixes, etc.; so does your firm’s instance of the software – immediately.
You don’t have to do anything to claim the new features and improvements.
Your experience, and that of your staff, continually gets better.
As customers make requests for specific enhancements to the software and those improvements are built and released on a true cloud platform, all firms and legal departments receive the same access to said enhancements. Therefore, all NetDocuments users benefit as a result of enhancement requests and their release.
For example, NetDocuments’ Am Law 100 customers made specific requests for functionality that became the products SetBuilder and ChatLink. SetBuilder dramatically reduces the time legal teams spend building document sets, while ChatLink makes it possible to integrate the NetDocuments platform into a Microsoft Teams environment. Once built, both SetBuilder and ChatLink were made available to every customer, no matter their size, increasing efficiencies for large law firms, corporate legal teams, and solo firms alike.
Security is the top priority any way you look at it; for clients, for your organization’s clients, for your team, and for the service we deliver. That’s why we use award-winning, military-grade technology to secure your documents and data. It’s also important to be aware that the cybersecurity landscape is always changing, with new threats emerging all the time, meaning if your security isn’t up-to-date your documents are at risk.
On average, hackers attack every 39 seconds, exploiting the newest vulnerabilities to their advantage. Thanks to the inheritance functionality built into the NetDocuments platform, as soon as a defense for these vulnerabilities is built, it is immediately deployed to each customer’s instance of the software—protecting your data without ever interrupting the flow of work.
Our customers have a responsibility to stay compliant with laws and regulations that govern how they store, manage, and destroy information.
NetDocuments maintains a current ISO 27001 certification, including the additional controls from ISO 27017, ISO 27018, and ISO 27701 for privacy controls. We also undergo an annual Type 2 SOC 2 audit for the Trust Services criteria of Security, Availability, and Privacy.
Our single, global SaaS platform allows you to take advantage of these audits and certifications via pass-through compliance, meaning you have independent confirmation of the security infrastructure being used to protect your documents and data. NetDocuments has done the heavy lift so you don’t have to. You can rely on NetDocuments’ certifications and attestations to help you—and your clients—validate and maintain controls required by some of the world’s strictest data protection laws, including GDPR and HIPAA.
A key benefit of both on-premises and cloud platforms is having tools that work together, making your work experience seamless as you move between different platforms. However, if your platform is on-premises your organization cannot immediately benefit from new compatibilities—effectively arresting you at current efficiency and productivity levels.
When a true-cloud platform builds inheritance into their software, like NetDocuments, you have instant access to each added application, helping you come closer to building a single platform in which to work—simplifying the production process and increasing the speed of communication between functions within the organization.
Using a platform that updates automatically and lives in the cloud can actually save your business money. Once you sign up, you never have to upgrade or migrate to the next version, there is no additional hardware required to improve your experience, and (perhaps most importantly), there is no loss of productivity when you switch from one system to the next because all of the innovation and development is happening where you work. Smaller firms may also benefit from the lower up-front costs of a cloud-based platform compared with an on-premises system.
Lawyers, law firms, and corporate legal teams have much to gain from cloud-based legal tech that allows them to inherit the benefits of bleeding-edge innovation—from reduced costs to stronger security to a constantly-improving experience. Your DMS is the central hub of your team’s work, which makes all of these benefits even more valuable when you choose to move to a legal DMS and a true-cloud platform.
To learn more about NetDocuments, get a 15 minute business assessment by calling (866) 638-3627 or click here to request a demo.