Product Update 28 Jan 2021 5 min read

Opus 2 January product update

Steve Fleming Steve Fleming

Happy 2021! 

In 2020 we witnessed the global legal community show incredible resilience in the face of unprecedented disruptions and uncertainty. We are pleased to have played part in keeping the wheels of justice in motion by helping thousands of clients remain connected and facilitating more than 550 virtual/hybrid hearings, worldwide.  

As we evolve our offerings, we continue to focus on our solutions' scalability, reliability, and usability. We are preparing to deliver our next key release (version 7.5) in the coming weeks. Here is a closer look at some major themes we are working on: 

Enhancing case preparation support 

Enhancing capabilities and support for case preparation during the early stages of a dispute remains a vital development theme, especially in EMEA and APAC. We are wrapping up two important beta programs - offline mode and timeline visualisation. We have gathered invaluable feedback from our beta users, which we are in the process of implementing. Both these features will be available soon for early access, so watch this space! 

Chronology and fact management is one of the primary capabilities we introduced to support lawyers during early-stage case preparation. We have added several performance improvements designed to enhance the scalability of chronologies in very large matters.  

Streamlined document ingestion 

In 2020, we provisioned more virtual workspaces for legal teams than ever before. As the appetite for working online and in a more collaborative manner accelerates, our clients have also indicated the desire for more autonomy and control over how they import documents into workspaces.  

We have redesigned the upload manager to simplify and streamline the ingestion process. The new upload manager has undergone a detailed UX review to create a more intuitive experience and smarter error and exception handling. These improvements will reduce the amount of manual intervention required when uploading large, complex document sets. Live status and progress indicators provide continuous feedback on ongoing uploads and processing steps, giving users more control and visibility. 

We have also made many backend improvements to make the upload and processing faster and more resilient. 

Continuous improvement 

We will be delivering various minor improvements and updates across the platform in the upcoming release. Following client requests, we have added Boolean logic to the documents page filter. Users will now be able to filter documents by applying AND/OR logic to any document metadata making it easier and faster to find specific content. We have also made it quicker to download the native files, such as videos and text files, associated with transcripts directly from the transcript properties. 

Another notable update is the ability to export all the incoming and outgoing links to a document, which is especially helpful in the later stages of a case. For example, if you are preparing closing arguments, you can efficiently extract all the cross-references into your document. 

We look forward to rolling out these updates soon. As the technology adoption and the digital transformation across the legal sector continues to accelerate, we remain firmly focused on working closely with our clients to develop solutions that mirror and complement how lawyers work. As always, we welcome your feedback and any questions you may have, so please do not hesitate to contact us.