MasterFile makes it simple to create small project and case files or collections of paper documents that need to be shared — especially ones that have a core set of documents that are critical or confidential.

Many of these are kept securely or in a vault; sharing working copies or referring to them creates challenges as photocopies as they too must be secured. Scanning these in to a MasterFile repository created specifically solves this problem as granular access can be granted to whoever needs it.

Whether you’re managing your own contracts, or are counsel managing contracts for your clients, digging through and rereading contracts wastes time and can not only be avoided but the pitfall of failing to find the right clause, or forgetting about exceptions can be costly.

MasterFile’s Extract Repository, doc-link technology and full text search will let you solve such problems, as you can

• Create extracts with brief descriptions of critical clauses. Then link them to issues such as “Termination” as well as provide any notes or commentary highlighting important points. Since these appear both as summaries with documents and in various “by Issue/Topic” views, you can pinpont the necessary clause and see why it’s relevant.
• Insert doc-links to paragraphs you’ve extracted in various documents or to documents themselves so you can find related material quickly and see why they’re relevant.
• Search the contracts for a specific phrase or word to pinpoint clauses when issues arise.

MasterFile does not actually require that you load any documents at all. In some situations you may wish to initially just catalogue  some or all of your documents rather than scanning and importing them into MasterFile which creates a profile ‘stub’. Scanning and importing can be done later as time or resources become available and those files simply dragged  and dropped into their existing profiles. In fact, the MasterFile Watchfolder actually has a specific function “Add file to existing doc profile” just for this — drop your PDFs or other files into it and MasterFile will prompt repeatedly to select the appropriate profile and add the file to it. Wrofile information you need for each document by going through a paper file and rapidly entering the information in a spreadsheet. Each column represents one of the required fields listed above, i.e. document type, date, etc. You can then simply use Express Load to automatically process the CSV file and create a profile for each line of data.

Although one of MasterFile’s primary functions is to organize and manage evidentiary and work -product documents, MasterFile’s Fact & Argument Drafting module is by itself a unique and complete application that can can be used with or without any documents.

Simply create your facts and chronology events as usual and describe the evidence relied upon in the “Sources of fact, argument and counter-argument” field. Creating document and extract profiles, even without the documents, as described above, will let you use MasterFile’s doc-link technology to set out, point by point, the evidence you rely upon in your argument quickly and easily without repeatedly typing descriptions of that evidence, for example “Letter of 12th Jan, 2003 from Jeff to counsel at …”.

How many times have you tried to look for an important authority or reference article but given up because you forgot where you saw it or in which case it was used? To solve this problem, simply create a MasterFile database for authorities. Set up the various issue or topic categories by which you wish to organize your authorities and their extracts and start adding them just as you would any other document.

MasterFile’s doc-link technology does not limit you to doc-links within the same database. You can therefore link to references, authorities in your reference database or documents or extracts in any MasterFile case from any other and since all MasterFile databases have the same architecture, you can replicate any reference database just like a case database to your laptop and create a local copy so you can work and link to material even if you’re off-line.

Just as you can create an authorities MasterFile database, you can create a separate case database to hold bulky evidence separately from the documents in a case. This particularly useful is digital evidence such as audio or video clips. We suggest you keep transcript in the primary case database so it’s available for searching and extracting, and a doc-link to a secondary database which stores the actual audio or video file. Separating the data in this fashion will keep your primary MasterFile database to a reasonable size so it can fit on notebooks giving mobile users access to the transcript information without squeezing in gigabytes of data.

The converse of splitting one case file into multiple databases is to merge several case files into one database. This is useful if yo find you have many of small files with just a few documents in each and there’s no real need to create a separate MasterFile database for each. In these situations, you need the MasterFile ‘Miscellaneous File’.

Unlike typical miscellaneous files into whihc papers seem to vanish an electronic version in MasterFile database gives you control. Simply create an Issue/Topic keyword to identify each case file. Then, as you create or load documents, players or facts (if necessary) simply assign the respective Issue/Topic keyword you created, tagging all case documents under one code so can see everything in the file in the by Issue/Topic views. The “by From”, “by To” and “by Doc Type, From”, views will also let you quickly locate documents relevant to a particular file by the individuals and organizations associated with that file.

One more tip: make the identifying Issue/Topic case code a “Required” Issue/Topic”. That way tagging is forced when profiles for that case are created or loaded and not forgotten.

Although extract profiles are primarily intended to be used for key information from documents, they can be used to keep notes and ad-hoc information related to a document private by setting security permitting yourself, others or a group, access. Only users with permission to read will see it in views and even know it exists. The same part of a document can also be extracted several times by different users, or by yourself, for different access grants or privacy needs.

One of our clients uses MasterFile’s binder tab view for their client’s corporate records. We thought it very clever so wrote about it here. A MasterFile database for each binder holds scanned copies of the corporate records, categorized by appropriate document types and topics.