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by Justin Guinn | Updated Aug. 5, 2022 – First published on May 18, 2022
Image source: Getty Images
You’ve heard it before, and here it is again: Digital transformation is a must.
There are a ton of layers to that statement, and one layer that’s become relatively low-hanging fruit is implementing a paperless office. It’s been apparent for some time that paper-based document management and business dealings are expensive and inefficient.
Put simply, you must commit to going paperless in the office. It’s a move that positively impacts your budget, business efficiency, and brand positioning as well as the world at large.
It’s time to adopt digital document management best practices by implementing communication strategies and productivity apps that eliminate the need for paper.
Regardless of your business, it’s well past time for you to adopt a digital filing system and go paperless. But there are a few critical considerations to keep in mind before implementing your new paperless filing system.
You’ll need to address these key hurdles before working through the best practices highlighted below.
There’s just no need to continue operating so inefficiently. (via CloudPoint Technology) Image source: Author
Going paperless is the right move for all businesses, but you still need to work through how your new paperless operation will uniquely impact your business metrics.
Moving to a paperless, digitally driven organization should definitely save money in your business budget, even after paying for your document management system.
It should also increase efficiency across the board. Two efficiency boosters include reducing human error in lost papers and incorrect filings and decreasing the time between submitting bids to clients and closing deals with e-signing documents.
There are innate technology core competencies that employees and clients will need in order to successfully transition to a paperless operation. The day-to-day experience with your new document management systems will be similar to navigating your business website.
So as long as people are comfortable executing basic online browsing and using websites, they should be fine with the transition.
Still, it’s a good idea to mitigate any issues by building proper instruction documentation to walk clients through the process and provide struggling employees with a guide.
Keep your instructions as simple as possible by incorporating some screenshots and limiting each instructional section to a single task.
For example, you should be able to share instructions on how to upload a file to a particular folder without having to share all the instructions for e-signing and other tasks.
Once you’ve made the switch to digital, you’re going to have a bunch of dormant equipment laying around your office. While this isn’t hugely impactful for your business, you do need to determine what will happen with your retired printers, copiers, fax machines, etc.
You may be able to recoup some money by selling them. If that’s too much hassle, you can probably donante them and have someone come take them off your hands. Just get a plan in place so that you’re not suddenly wondering what to do with a bunch of bulky office equipment.
You’re ready to go paperless in your business. It’s rightfully exciting, as it provides tons of positive impact to your operation, your personal branding, and of course the environment.
Your transition to paperless will be easier than you think. (via Ezop) Image source: Author
Here are five best practices to ensure you have a smooth transition to becoming a paperless business and installing a sustainable operation to take on the future.
A document management system is the foundation on which you’ll operate your paperless business. It is your new digital filing cabinet and file retrieval system, as well as a solution for sharing and collaborating on files.
You’ll use your documentation retention solution as an essential tool to create, secure, and share critical documents, so be sure you take the time to get the system that’s best for your business needs.
And make sure you have the technical ability to operate and manage the system. If you take care of your own website management, you should be fine with managing your new document management system.
Here are a few tips for adopting and implementing a document management system.
A major benefit of a document management system is the ease with which you can find documents. But this search capability doesn’t just happen — it requires tons of organizational effort and detailed tagging inputs.
So before you can bring on your new document management system, you’ll need to account for all the digital and paper-based documents you already have. This means scanning, uploading, organizing, categorizing, tagging, formatting, and much, much more.
This will most definitely be the largest hurdle in transitioning to a paperless office, so start ASAP and work to get ahead of this project so that it costs you less time in the future.
Here are a few tips for organizing your existing documents to ensure a detailed and easily searchable document database.
You must lead by example to make a successful transition to going paperless. Regardless of the new document management software and organization apps you implement, your employees need to see that you’re committed to the paperless cause.
This type of top-down leadership is essential for managing any kind of change in your business.
Here are a few tips to help you lead by example as you go paperless with your business operation.
Employee engagement and buy-in is critical for making a seamless transition to your new paperless office and operating style. You need to focus on ways to engage employees and get them motivated and committed to making the change to paperless.
Leading by example through top-down change management is essential, but you should also consider additional tactics to rally your employees toward the cause, such as gamification and training exercises.
Here are a few tips to ensure your employees become equally as committed to going paperless as you.
Take advantage of employees who are excited about and committed to going paperless by assigning them as paperless champions.
These champions will become quasi-experts on the transition and new systems and provide a helpful and willing resource for any questions that employees have along the journey.
Here are two tips for establishing and choosing champions to support the transition to paperless and adoption of new document software.
If you’re serious about going paperless, these considerations and best practices will help you build the path to get there. The technology to do so has been around for a while, and it continues to get more affordable, easier to use, and feature-rich every year.
All the tools are there to take your entire business into the digital realm, but it’s up to you to lead your people through the archaic paper wasteland and show them the ease and efficiency that awaits them in their new paperless business.
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Justin Guinn is an SMB technology expert writing for The Ascent and The Motley Fool.
We’re firm believers in the Golden Rule, which is why editorial opinions are ours alone and have not been previously reviewed, approved, or endorsed by included advertisers. The Ascent does not cover all offers on the market. Editorial content from The Ascent is separate from The Motley Fool editorial content and is created by a different analyst team.
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Heidi Kenyon – Content Designer, Modern Work Customer Co-InnovationJan 27, 2022
When it comes to productivity, few sectors know better than the legal industry how time-consuming research can be. A daunting amount of information is needed for success and getting the details right is critical. Indeed, a top pain point for lawyers is coping with increased volume and complexity of information, according to a 2021 Future Ready Lawyer study from Wolters Kluwer, a thought leader in the legal space and a global provider of professional information, software solutions and services.
And it’s not just lawyers who face this challenge. Knowledge workers could save between four and six hours on average per week if they didn’t need to search for or recreate information, according to a 2021 Ziff Davis study on Knowledge Sharing sponsored by Microsoft. That represents 11%-14% of their work time, or over a month of lost productivity per employee per year.
That’s why Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory and Microsoft’s Modern Work Customer Co-Innovation team (MWCCI) partnered in 2021 to explore potential solutions to legal productivity challenges.
“Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory was the perfect partner because of its deep experience in the legal productivity space, and its desire and ability to do something truly innovative,” says Harald Becker, director of Customer Engagements, MWCCI.
MWCCI’s co-innovation model involves forming a virtual multidisciplinary product team spanning companies. In this case, it brought together engineers, designers, researchers and others from six countries and three continents. The team works together to thoroughly understand a given problem, define a potential solution, build a working prototype and test it with users—all in an aggressive timeline of about six months. The process is optimized to move quickly and generate mutual learning.
The Wolters Kluwer–MWCCI team began with a deep dive into each other’s research, products and platform capabilities. It identified the target user as an attorney in a law firm or corporate legal department and explored multiple possibilities for how to improve the user’s workflow.
“We thought that if we could leverage Wolters Kluwer’s deep domain knowledge to determine the legal context of the document a lawyer is working on, we could proactively surface useful information that would accelerate the lawyer’s workflow and help them produce higher-quality work,” says David Jones, MWCCI’s principal program manager for this engagement. “This could include analytics for legal arguments, risk analysis for contracts, subject matter experts within the firm—or even just the right legal research or template.”
In just a few weeks, the team articulated the concept it wanted to build: a tool that could bring legal professionals relevant, high-value content from a variety of data sources within their existing workflows, which, for many lawyers, means within Microsoft Word.
“We started to think of the vision for our concept as a kind of legal coach,” says Peter Backx, vice president of Product Management, Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory. “We believed that it could become something that helps lawyers improve the outcome of their work.”
It was clear early on that the team would need to leverage machine learning, specifically document understanding AI—the ability for machines to read and understand the content of documents. This raised questions about users’ confidence in the information that the algorithms were bringing them.
“We knew users might wonder, ‘Why is the system showing me this?’ ’Is this the right information?’ ‘Has anything been overlooked?’ ‘What determines what’s important to display and what isn’t?’” Jones explains. The team agreed that intentionally building a foundation of trust for the system would be critical. Designers explored different ways of explaining within the interface why a given resource was suggested, which they believed would support users’ trust in the system.
Within a few months, the team began to build. It split into two parallel tracks, one focused on user experience and visual design, the other on technical architecture. The UX design track generated multiple potential user-interface designs. “It was fun to debate the merits of each and reach a consensus on the approach that would best address the customer’s needs,” says Magdalena Sowula, lead product manager, Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory.
The technical track was more of a challenge. The team tried multiple ways of extracting legal context from documents but failed, at first, to get useful results. “For a period of time it looked like our project might fail,” Jones says candidly.
MWCCI’s co-innovation model involves forming a virtual multidisciplinary product team spanning companies. In this case, it brought together engineers, designers, researchers and others from six countries and three continents.
The breakthrough came when engineers fed the documents into annotation models that Wolters Kluwer had built to mark-up official court documents. Although the models weren’t originally designed to be used in this way and the information they returned wasn’t perfect, with more work the team successfully created something to build on.
“As we worked through these challenges together, we did more than find creative solutions to our technical problems,” says Jones. “We developed a shared vocabulary and understanding of the problem space. We learned about the unique skills and diverse backgrounds that each of us brought to the table. And we learned to trust one another and how to work together as a single team.”
By December 2021 a prototype was up and running in Word. Currently, it can analyze German litigation documents and retrieve related legal commentaries and court decisions from Wolters Kluwer’s services, as well as related Word documents from a given user’s internal SharePoint site. The team is running a small user study with legal professionals to get feedback before expanding resource retrieval to other data sources.
“We’re excited to see how our customers will react,” Backx says.
While the project team looks forward to seeing its concept come to life and getting customer feedback, the intense mutual learning that takes place in a co-innovation process of this kind is already yielding other benefits. On the Wolters Kluwer side, the project sparked an acceleration of integration activities with Microsoft that can significantly improve legal workflows and go well beyond existing plug-ins. On the Microsoft side, the SharePoint team is exploring how it could support such third-party content-annotation services in the Microsoft 365 platform.
“In a world that sometimes feels increasingly divided,” Sowula says, “we’re glad to be partnering together to improve the productivity of legal workflows and create new value across ecosystems.”
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by Mark Roy Long | Updated Aug. 5, 2022 – First published on May 18, 2022
Image source: Getty Images
As a small business owner, there are plenty of unexpected situations you may suddenly find yourself in: undergoing an IRS audit, responding to an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) complaint filed by a past or current employee, dealing with a vendor who insists you didn’t make a payment, or resolving a workman’s comp claim.
In each of these cases, you’ll be required to provide business records to show exactly what you did or did not do. If you can’t, you could easily face hefty fines or other penalties. That’s why it’s critical to create and maintain a document retention policy.
Document retention is the process by which records required for ongoing business operations are identified and maintained. A document retention policy provides guidelines for the review, secure storage, and periodic destruction of unneeded records.
Your records will generally fall into the following categories:
The amount of paperwork and digital records generated will multiply over time as you add more customers, employees, products, and vendors.
An effective document management system will allow you to efficiently store and access records, reduce the cost of document production during legal cases, and follow all laws for the preservation of certain records.
Plus, if one or more of the situations in the records management checklist below sounds familiar, you definitely need to set up a document retention and management system as soon as possible.
Documentation retention guidelines will help you avoid all of these problematic situations. Image source: Author
While a document retention policy will aid your internal business operations, it can also help externally. For example, customers want to know their data is being securely stored, so you might highlight the security and maintenance of your records as part of your website marketing.
Creating and using your document retention policy is not a one-time endeavor — it’s an ongoing activity. It’s not part of the (perhaps more exciting) front-line activities you’re likely more focused on, such as sales and customer service, so it may help, as you work through the steps below, to use one of the best productivity apps available to help keep your record-keeping on track.
First, you need to comprehensively catalog all of your existing documents to see exactly what you have as well as the quantity of physical and digital records you’re dealing with.
The key strategy with your initial document inventory is to be methodical. And while you may know — or think you know! — where everything of relevance is, you need to talk to all of your employees to discover any other formal or informal physical and digital repositories you may not be aware of.
While a document may have been relevant at one point in time, that doesn’t mean it always will be. With a few exceptions — deeds, patents, auditor reports, and annual financial records — almost every document has a limited lifespan, usually no longer than 10 years.
Keeping records any longer than necessary has the potential to create legal liabilities for your business. For example, the discovery process during litigation could find additional damaging information in your records that should have been already deleted.
Plus, you don’t want to be responsible for any confidential customer information being accessed that also should have been destroyed. That’s why establishing a clearly defined document retention schedule is the backbone of your document management policy.
Effective storage of documents is critical to preserve records as well as ensuring access to them as necessary in a timely manner.
That includes everything from locking file cabinets and storage rooms at your business, to using a “secure drawer” as part of your website management, to other offsite options.
Digital documents require less storage space than their physical counterparts. On the other hand, you may have legacy paper or wet signature documents you want to maintain as hard copies.
Offsite storage of digital records in a data center can increase security and lessen the chances that documents are stolen, lost due to natural disasters, or accidentally destroyed. Image source: Author
Just as you need to keep necessary business documents, you also need to destroy them according to your retention schedule. That will keep storage costs down and reduce the chances of business and customer data being accessed illegally or inappropriately.
Minimize the chance of future legal issues by explicitly documenting chain-of-custody procedures when destroying paper documents and electronic files.
Even the best document retention policy won’t have a net positive effect if none of your employees know about it. That’s why using effective communication strategies will be key, especially as the policy is updated over time.
Your document retention policy also won’t be particularly effective if there’s only a printout of it in a three-ring binder that’s sitting on the top shelf in a seldom-used storage closet. Instead, make it available online for easy access by your employees.
Don’t wait until a critical event occurs — an IRS audit, natural disaster, or lawsuit — to realize you need a robust record retention schedule. Instead, begin the process outlined above to develop your document retention policy now.
Sure, you’ll have to build the cost into your business budget, but over the long haul, it will definitely pay for itself — and more! — by saving you both time and money.
Cash back, travel rewards, 0% intro APR financing: all of these can be great credit card perks for business owners. But how do you find the right business credit card for you? There are tons of offers on the market today, and sifting through them to find the right one can be a big hassle. So we've done the hard work for you.
Get started with one of our top business credit card picks of 2022 today.
Mark Roy Long is a technology journalist and workflow expert writing for The Ascent and The Motley Fool.
We’re firm believers in the Golden Rule, which is why editorial opinions are ours alone and have not been previously reviewed, approved, or endorsed by included advertisers. The Ascent does not cover all offers on the market. Editorial content from The Ascent is separate from The Motley Fool editorial content and is created by a different analyst team.
The Ascent is a Motley Fool service that rates and reviews essential products for your everyday money matters.
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