Mandolin Creek Legal Office

The Mandolin Creek Legal Office product provides tools that facilitate the production of documents required during the discovery process inherent with most legal cases. This product builds on the core services.

These tools enable an organization to accomplish most routine administration tasks that can be required to comply with document retention and production laws. Ultimately, this extension should help mitigate exposure to, cost of, and liability from any possible litigation, whether brought against or by individual, corporate, or state actors.

The Legal Office product builds upon the systems provided by the Mandolin Creek Paperless Office product.

Goals

The functional areas covered by the Legal Office product (as well as the typical office document production workflow task order) has been decomposed into the following areas: 

1. Generation - Ensures creation and archiving of time-and-mission critical documents (e.g. minutes)
   
   1. Wizards - Built-in and custom wizards guide users through legal document workflows
2. Retention - Implements required document retention processes for organization
   
   1. Categorization - Marks documents using automatic or custom retention policies
   2. Retention - Ensures documents are retained as long as needed 
   3. Destruction - Ensures documents are destroyed when no longer needed
3. Collection - Locates and identifies relevant documents (from Paperless Office) on a per-case basis
   1. Search - Builds an editable list of simple searches that produce all required documents 
   2. Staging - Prepares an isolated "copy" of collected documents
4. Reviewing - Assists with viewing and reviewing heterogeneous document collection
   
   1. Presentation - Displays collected documents to determine their relevance  
   2. Tagging - Marks new documents to include into binders (or to discard)
5. Collate - Collects documents tagged during collection into binders
   1. Collation - Sorts like tagged documents together into organized collections
   2. Sorting - Automatic, manual, or custom ordering algorithms   
6. Redact - Obscures sensitive information in specified collections, documents, and pages
   1. Simple - Manually specify Black Box Geometry
   2. Automatic - Locates sensitive information using... certain methods
7. Label - Produces identification documents and overlays  
   1. Identification - Lists important details of document: author, origin, date, size, signature, etc.
   2. Summation - Summarizes large, heavily redacted, or complex documents 
   3. Stylizing - Applies court-specified style rules and labeling
   4. Signing - Ensures documents cannot be easily altered.
8. Bind - Creates individual binders that group collated documents
   
   1. Indexing - Creates table of contents with master index of document page numbers
   2. Labeling - Adds master page number to bound documents
   3. Unification - Appends document pieces into a single electronic document
9. Secure - Adds password protection to produced documents
   1. Public key - Uses strong encryption to restrict access to select individuals 
   2. Symmetric key - Uses weak encryption to prevent casual access or modification 
10. Publish 
    1. Preview - Produces the final PDF copy for review 
    2. Archive - Archives the produced documents on your Paperless Office server
    3. Announcement - Aids production of a memorandum to introuce the documennts
    4. To Printer - Creates collated hard copies of the produced documents
    5. To Email, Fax, etc - Delivers documents directly to recipients
    6. To Remote Paperless Office - Delivers to a remote Paperless Office server

Software

The Mandolin Creek Legal Office currently exists as an integral part of the Mandolin Creek System Helpers package.

Libraries

The Legal Office current provides a single prototype, developed by the founder during his "divorce":

• doc/legal/exhibit - Legal exhibit support

Tools

The Legal Office package 

• e8 - Evidence helper