Wishing you and your loved ones a safe and relaxing holiday season. The InfoTrack team will be taking a break from 5pm AEDT Friday 20th December 2024, returning 8.30am Monday 13th January 2025. A few members of our HelpDesk team will be on hand to assist with enquiries from 8am-6pm AEDT, Monday to Friday, on 1800 738 524. We appreciate your patience during this time. Happy holidays!

Stephen Foley
May 24, 2022

How eBrief Ready is changing the game for law professionals

Stephen Foley has worked at the cutting edge of Australian legal tech innovation for the past 30 years and has a passion for creating a smarter, more sustainable legal industry and access to justice for all.

He has developed transcript and document management systems for barristers, law firms and courts in Australia, UK, and USA.

eBrief Ready is his latest creation – a 100% paperless, secure, and accessible platform for solicitors to instruct barristers and collaborate across the life of a matter. Launched in 2019, just prior to the pandemic, it has enjoyed phenomenal success.

In this Q&A interview, we explore Stephen’s passion for technology that better manages legal matters and streamlines the legal process and just how the eBrief Ready platform is transforming the way barristers and solicitors work together.

How did you become a pioneer of the Australian legal tech industry?

My grandfather and father ran Foley’s List. I would often work for my father during school holidays. By the time I left school, my interest was around technology and empowering clerks, barristers, and the profession as a whole to embrace technology and streamline their businesses and practices.

What inspired you to create eBrief Ready?

The eBrief Ready platform was designed to help address several important issues present across the legal industry:

What can be done to address the levels of waste (time, environmental, etc.) and cost in the legal process?
What can be done to improve the way barristers, solicitors and courts work together across the life of a matter?

We had a vision for an industry-standard approach to electronic briefing for the legal profession that addressed the challenges relating to each step of the process for producing, sharing, reviewing, and referencing briefs. These challenges included:

Solicitors were sending briefs to barristers using multiple technologies (e.g. Dropbox, One Drive, email, firm-specific platforms, USB sticks). There are obvious security issues associated with many of these options.
Some documents provided electronically were not searchable, because OCR (optical character recognition) was not performed during the scanning process.
Compiling documents into one large PDF bundle can be a time-consuming and fiddly process.
There is no consistently agreed format for PDF bundles.
The file size of some PDF bundles can be large enough to make it unstable to use. PDF bundles were not the answer to running matters online.

It was clear that a new approach, bringing together the array of solutions designed to address each step in the briefing process (from file sharing to PDF bundle creation to reviewing and referencing relevant documents) into a single, secure, and easily accessible platform, would deliver significant benefits to all involved in the matter.

How did the pandemic impact your business?

The achievement of our vision for the next generation of electronic briefing was dramatically accelerated by the pandemic. The eBrief Ready platform enabled the sudden shift to remote working and online courts, providing an easy and secure way for all parties to share documents relating to a matter and collaborate on the matter from anywhere at any time. Importantly, everything could be done from home, without needing any particular expertise, software, printers or the normal office administrative support and infrastructure!

Almost overnight, five of the 13 Barristers Lists in Melbourne adopted eBrief Ready as their preferred way to receive a brief, and law firms and Courts soon followed. Word spread across the country, and we went from 2,000 users following our launch in mid-2019 to 20,000 users 18 months later! Ten of the 13 Lists in Victoria are now eBrief Ready Lists.

Today, more than 70 million pages are stored within the platform, harnessing the power and scale of Amazon Web Service’s (AWS) servers based in Sydney. 750 law firms use the platform including the major Personal Injury and Family Law firms. The Victorian Office of Public Prosecutions now uses the platform to brief all their criminal matters, and it is increasingly being adopted by government legal teams. More and more Courts are receiving the eBrief Ready matters directly, eliminating the need to create a pdf document bundle (or courtbook).

How is eBrief Ready different from other bundling software?

Our solution is different to other PDF bundling solutions in that we provide access to more than just a pdf bundle of documents relating to a matter – we provide access to each document in its native format in a highly secure, searchable platform that is accessible to all parties across the life of the matter. A PDF version of each document is also automatically created which means users have the best of both worlds.

We also offer incredibly powerful searching and annotating capability, which leverages the meta data from the original documents – and simply cannot be matched. Basically, you can effectively run a whole matter online using eBrief Ready – and you just can’t do this with a bundle of documents, they get too big to manage and the same searching and annotating capabilities are not available that you have with the individual documents.

What’s next for eBrief Ready?

We have just received ISO2007 certification, which has been critical to demonstrate the security of the platform, particularly for larger law firms. We are currently focusing on improving integration with practice management and document management systems, to make it even easier to upload documents into eBrief Ready.

We are also developing voice to text recognition, so that when video and audio files are uploaded, eBrief Ready will automatically create a text transcription. This will make it much easier for users to find key data, comment and review the contents of this type of file.