What Exactly Is a Legal Document Courier?
Although there are many roles typical for couriers in everyday transactions, legal document couriers are a bit different – in their duties and the documents they transport. A legal document courier may be defined as a service professional that assists lawyers, legal firms, and administrative offices by delivering important legal documents as needed. These documents are usually time sensitive, and thus , must be successfully delivered in a timely manner.
A legal document courier is responsible for assisting in the delivery of legal documents. Legal documents include:
Witness subpoenas
Court filings
Service of process
Foreclosure skip tracing
E-filing
Judgements
Court orders
Demands
Motion work
Completions/Recordings
Opinions
Correspondences
Depositions
Summonses
Legal document couriers are familiar with the laws and rules that govern when and how documents should be filed and delivered based on document type and state / federal regulations. Legal document couriers typically have experience working with legal firms, administrative offices, or legal firms in past employment roles.
The Benefits of Utilizing Legal Document Couriers
Legal document couriers offer several advantages when it comes to the handling and transport of confidential materials. For instance, they are trained to be particularly careful with sensitive legal documents, which might include everything from settlement agreements to confidential motions or notices. The confidentiality of such documents is paramount to successful legal actions, which is a major reason that attorneys rely on legal document couriers to deliver their documents.
In addition to speed and reliability, an added benefit of using legal document couriers to deliver legal documents and pleadings is that the delivery drivers are experts at handling documents. If you are delivering this type of paperwork yourself, it can become torn, wet, or otherwise damaged. However, couriers that deliver legal documents have adequate training to know how to handle legal documents, so they do not suffer damage during transportation.
In most areas, legal document couriers offer a same day service, which means your documents will be delivered quickly and all your deadlines will be met. They can even deal with late night pleadings, and deliveries can be made to any location, whether a courthouse, another law office, or a private residence.
Features to Consider When Selecting a Legal Document Courier Service
When chartering to the wind and waves of changing regulations, evolving cases, and new jurisdictions, it’s essential to have a navigator you can trust at your helm for all your legal courier services. A successful law firm should look for:
Tracking Options: The best couriers offer tracking options that will set a firm’s mind at ease. Look for companies that offer access to GPS tracking so you can see the progress of your document: Where is it? Has it arrived? When you’re running a busy legal office, you don’t have time to to guess about the status of your documents.
Speed of Delivery: Choose a legal document courier that is known for speed. If you work in an area with many court closings, delays can be devastating, and it could could cost you a case. Look for a courier that guarantees same-day delivery.
Familiarity with Legal Time Limits: Nothing is more important to legal courier service than the act of being on time. Beyond just knowing when to show up at the courthouse, a good courier should have in-depth familiarity with legal deadlines and cut-off policies.
Extra Services: In addition to transportation services, choose a courier that offers digitization options so you can have your documents scanned into the proper format quickly and easily. When it comes to filing, look for a legal data entry service that offers to do the filing for you.
Legal Compliance: Legal documents rarely go from one place to another without a bump along the way. Sometimes a delivery may require multiple signatures, or a specific type of handling. Choose a company that offers to accommodate the legal requirements of you delivery so there is no confusion about where your documents have been or where they are going.
By evaluating these key features, you can choose a legal courier that will save you time and money.
Ensuring Security and Confidentiality with Legal Document Couriers
The need for confidentiality and strict adherence to protocol is the key to a courier’s role in the situations mentioned above. Making certain that you don’t compromise privileged or confidential documents is just one of the critical facets of what couriers do every day. The things you can do to ensure that confidentiality.
Communication
In many scenarios, there are back and forth emails where instructions are discussed about how to send a package from point A to point B. There may be times when you need to courier documents to someone traveling in the air. Have you put that into an email? That email may not be encrypted. When traveling, that’s not the time to risk having something seen on the screen of a personal handheld device when it gets left unattended. If your courier has to make an educated guess about what someone wants, your special instructions might go out of the window. Encrypt the email and give instructions over the phone whenever possible. If you can’t encrypt your email – or don’t know how – use a secure messaging service, like Briefcase Box or other similar program that encrypts messages by itself and stores them in an encrypted fashion.
Precautions
If paper documents are to be placed in a lock box, leaving them in the open on a desk for pickup is a big no-no. Is it possible you have a colleague delivering documents that doesn’t know you’ve instructed the pickup person to call you before she arrives at the office so you can go there and pick the package up yourself? With nothing more than a simple email, you’ve just invited her to steal confidential documents. Sure, you can ask her to destroy the document before she leaves the office, but how easy is it to save information to a thumb (or USB) drive and copy it at home when no one is looking? Just because someone has a small office within close proximity of your staff [standing by with hard copies of top secret information] doesn’t mean he works for your company.
Secure handling procedures
Print and copy services may be located on-site in your building or may be an off-site vendor. In either case, a courier can be tasked with delivering materials to be copied or can be instructed to pick them up later on. It is the courier’s job to be aware of the contents of any confidential package entrusted to him. Whether that information is on paper or a thumb drive, pdf or hardcopy, it is important never to open files or read papers that may look interesting or that you assume to be confidential. As a courier, it isn’t your job to guess what others find newsworthy, interesting, or embarrassing. Anything can be misconstrued and you are not there to judge what someone thought important enough to send.
Consider packaging
Is your document in a sealed envelope or in an open folder? Has it been placed in a zip lock bag, a tote bag, or a small cardboard box? If you work for a big law firm with its own delivery staff, box up your important materials so that no one who happens to enter the copy room sees you pulling out and repacking a bunch of different documents that someone ordered up. Don’t want anyone to know those redacted documents were sent here instead of kept at the main office? Pack everything into one box and seal it until you are en route to drop it off. Tape up extra boxes unless you want to search for things while standing in the middle of the street where you stopped to look something up on your phone.
Make sure that the contents of each package match the contents of your instructions. Unpacking in a designated location is the easiest way to make sure everything is where it should be.
Legal Aspects Surrounding Document Courier Services
The legal implications of document courier services should be top of mind for any company who regularly enlists the aid of couriers to transport legal and confidential documents. As court rulings have shown time and time again, failing to meet those obligations, including the obligation to treat the transmitted data as confidential, can have major implications on a case.
Like any other contract, courier companies sign contracts that bind their actions in return for the money they are paid for the job. Many of the documented duties are standard, including basic confidentiality agreements. However, the nature of the work can inject additional obligations into the contract.
For example, if a client asks a courier company to deliver important papers to a federal courthouse, the courier company has an obligation to understand the process for entering a federal facility. Courts that have decided on the liability of a courier (or lack thereof), often find for the courier in cases where the court finds that the client failed to fully brief the courier on the duties that the job required.
Likewise, there are reasonable steps that all courier companies are obligated to take when delivering contracts. If you’re handling sensitive documents, you should know not to leave documents unattended in public places or blend in with a large crowd of unrelated people. This is not just about the physical delivery of documents: All couriers are legally required to be aware of unauthorized access to documents while they are in the courier’s possession . In other words, a company cannot have its employee accidentally leave behind a thumb drive that contains sensitive documents at a coffee shop.
Technically speaking, correspondence to and from courts are handled differently and it’s important to do your research and know the rules of the court you’re working with. The Supreme Court of the United States, for example, has strict guidelines concerning the transmission and filing of documents. This includes written briefs (which may only be filed directly into the court’s electronic filing system) as well as cert petitions, pleadings, motions, petitions for writs, notices of appeal, and notices of appeal in capital cases, which must all be submitted to the Clerk’s Office in Washington D.C.
Couriers are not couriers are not couriers are not couriers. Despite the fact that the latter half of a courier’s duties are commonly understood and regulated, the initial duties, such as taking possession of documents and transmission are often not well understood and vary between cases. If you’re going to use a courier service for legal documents, make sure you or your legal team has a strong understanding of who is going to be transporting what, how it is going to be transported, etc. There are serious legal and financial repercussions for both the entity that hires a courier and the courier itself if programs go awry.
The Dilemma of the Digital vs. Physical Document Courier
There are many pros and cons to both digital and physical delivery of documents. Generally speaking, digital copies are faster to transmit. An email with a PDF attachment can be instantly sent and even immediately responded to, which isn’t possible with physical documents. There’s also the added benefit that attachments aren’t limited by size, so large files can be sent electronically as easily as small ones.
Perhaps one of the most important reasons that many people feel safe sending digital communication is that it’s impossible to lose track of it, unlike a paper document that can become damaged or discarded accidentally. This gives many legal professionals peace of mind.
Sending a document electronically is also considerably less expensive than sending a physical document, especially if you send a large number of files regularly. But there are also reasons that sending physical documents may be a better option.
For example, some documents are simply too large to send digitally. Those cases can involve specific deadlines for documents or need physical signatures from clients. In these instances, there’s no option for digital transmission.
As already mentioned, many people are wary of digital documents, especially those that contain sensitive or confidential information. It’s essential to have the right safeguards in place to send those securely to protect your client, yourself and your firm.
There are many reasons it simply makes sense for you to send documents using a courier. For one reason, some documents still can’t be sent digitally — such as when you typically have physical signatures or they need to be physically delivered to a specific person in a strict time window. You know your business best, and you’ll naturally know when and why it makes sense for you to send documents to those important recipients.
Or, you may find that when it’s actually less expensive for you to send a hard file with a courier, that it just makes more sense to send those documents the way your send them all. There’s comfort in this method, even if only psychologically.
The Future and Trends of Legal Document Courier Services
Recent trends in the legal document delivery business cut across technological advances as well as the evolving landscape of legal requirements. On the tech front, with more and more legal documents being prepared digitally to begin with, it is no surprise that the trend continues for couriers to be able to accept more electronic documents in electronic formats.
With closings rapidly moving to the cloud, investors and other parties can electronically sign and notarize documents for transactions performed entirely online. That requires the courier to not only receive the documents but also return original documents when required.
Forward-thinking courier companies, of course, understand that to have all of these systems work together efficiently to handle the management of a legal document in its multiple versions at different times in various formats, knowledge of the file types and systems is imperative . In addition, courier companies have to be more knowledgeable about things like mandatory filing fees and related rules in order to become a true partner to its legal clients.
Add to this that the courthouse technology is evolving to allow for e-filing as well, and you can see why having an experienced and trusted courier service on your side becomes critical.
Another trend involves the increasing requirements for security certifications. While that touches upon many issues, including hiring practices and compliance with federal regulations, it is an overall trend that is quickly becoming the standard of practice in the industry. Companies such as EPIQ Court Review are bringing order to the certification process through certification standards, which have been accepted by 50 jurisdictions. As the new norm goes into effect in 2014, issuers of the EPIQ certification will issue certifications for qualifying courier services based these new standards.