SCANNING & ALLOCATION
Today we will have a look at a very important component of The Legal Assistant
that enables you to operate in an almost paperless environment.
The 'Allocation' feature is designed to dramatically speed up your offices throughput for single and
multi-page document scanning. The philosophy behind the allocation feature is that all scanned
documents are imported into a specific folder on your server. Once imported, the hard copies,
now in digital format, can be quickly glanced at, recognized which case files they should be assigned to
and be allocated to that file.
Paper that comes into your office will first be scanned. Identifying to which File-Number
they belong to is a function that can be done before scanning and be written on the first page
of the document being scanned. Depending on the scanner
The Folder shown in the Incoming Files Path should be the folder into which the scanner will scan
documents. (The displayed folder is linux based folder - a windows folder would look like c:\TLA\Allocate
When scanned documents get allocated to a Case File it will become visible in the attachments.
You should allocate a Category to the attachment for later research of a relevant attachment.
Categories can be maintained by navigating to Adminstration – System Tables – Attachment Category
Now we’re ready to Allocate the scanned documents – so navigate to: Frequent Tasks – Allocate Mail
The first file in the /opt/TLA2/Allocate folder will be displayed. If you select a specific entry the document
will be displayed. As you see the person who prepared the scanning has notated that this document should
be filed under the hand-written File-Number. After having entered the required information hit Attach to Case.
After which this document disappears from the list and the next document is displayed.
Notice that the newly attached document is displayed at the top of the list. You will see that there’s
a blue arrow pointing inwards indicating an incoming document, whereas the rest have red arrows
pointing outwards indicating outgoing system generated documents.
By clicking on the Title you will be able to see the Description, Category and Comment concerning the
document displayed on the right hand side. You can open the document into a separate TAB –
You can re-allocate the document to a different Case if it had been wrongly allocated.
Instead of the regular listing of Attachments, you can select Grid View where you will be able to see
thumbnail displays of all the attached documents.
In the list presentation there is a Drop Down Menu marked Actions on the right hand side where you can select an Action for this attachment.
Download file allows you to download it from TLA to your local drive.
Distribute will allow you to send this document to everyone concerned with Case.
The System shows those people in the system connected to this Case that have an email.
You can manually Add an email or more than 1 into the section so identified.
Fax’s associated with everyone associated with the Case will be displayed in the 3rd list box
with manual entry of further faxes. After specifying the recipients you can select any of the
attachments that also need to be distributed.
Print: will do just that if printers have been properly setup.
Copy/Move:
This function will allow you to Copy or Move this Attachment to a different Case.
You can search fr the Case by clicking on the Change Case File symbol.
X Delete: This will remove the attachment from the list of associated attachments.