The request from the solicitor
A former employee of a client has brought a claim. The client's solicitor, or your own consultancy if you support clients at that stage, asks for the documents that relate to the case: the contract, the relevant policies, the letters, meeting notes, the investigation report, emails between managers. They want them in date order, with an index and page numbers.
Somebody in your office then spends several days hunting through the case file, the client's emails and old shared drive folders, printing to PDF, merging files and numbering pages. Then a late document turns up and half the page numbers change.
Why bundles are so laborious
- Documents from one case sit in several places, often in different formats.
- Emails need converting to readable PDFs with their attachments kept in order.
- Dates are inconsistent: a letter dated one day, sent the next, filed later.
- Pagination is done after merging, so any addition means redoing it.
- The index is typed by hand from the merged file.
None of this needs legal judgement. It is document handling, and it happens to land on skilled people at a stressful moment.
What the manual approach costs
Days of staff time on a job that is mostly mechanical. Errors that matter, such as a page number in the index that does not match the bundle, or a document included twice. Late additions that force a rebuild. And stress on a case that already carries plenty, because the bundle is often needed alongside everything else the case demands.
| Task | By hand | With the bundle tool |
|---|---|---|
| Finding documents | Search inboxes and folders | Select from the case record |
| Converting emails | Print to PDF one by one | Converted with attachments in order |
| Ordering | Drag files around | By date or by section you define |
| Pagination | After merging, redone on changes | Applied on build, always current |
| Index | Typed by hand | Generated from document details |
How we build the bundle tool
- Documents already on the case record, including filed emails, letters, notes and uploads, are listed with their dates, authors and types.
- Additional documents can be pulled from Outlook, SharePoint or uploaded from the client, and are added to the same list.
- Emails are converted to PDF with headers visible and attachments placed immediately after them.
- The person preparing the bundle selects documents, sets sections if needed and chooses the order. Duplicates are flagged when the same document appears twice.
- The tool builds the bundle as one PDF with continuous page numbers, a generated index and bookmarks for each document.
- Adding or removing a document rebuilds the bundle and index automatically, and each version is kept.
- Text is made searchable in scanned documents so the bundle can be searched by anyone using it.
Which documents go in, how they are sectioned and any format requirements are decisions for whoever is conducting the claim and the tribunal's own directions. The tool assembles. It does not advise on the case.
What changes
The same tool helps well before any claim. Consultancies use it to put together a tidy file for an appeal manager, or a pack of documents for a client director who needs to understand a long-running case quickly. Anything that needs ordered, indexed documents from a case record comes out of the same process.
A bundle that took days of copying is built from the case record in a sitting, and late documents stop being a crisis. The index always matches. Your consultancy can also produce a tidy set of documents for a client's solicitor quickly, which reflects well on the whole service. And because case records are the source, consultancies that already keep good case files find that bundles almost build themselves.
Could you use this?
- Preparing a bundle takes days of someone's time.
- A late document has forced you to renumber pages.
- Emails are printed to PDF one at a time.
- The index has been out of step with the bundle.
- Case documents for one matter live in several places.