Digitizing Law Firm Processes

Hey, I'm Martin Kurtz, attorney at law and one of the two founders of MaraDocs. Welcome to the MaraDocs blog. We write about topics at the intersection of legal practice and IT.

This is the second article in the Lawyer2Dev – A Journey series. In this article series, I cover my own professional story and motivation, but above all, I examine many concepts and technologies that shape today's IT landscape from my perspective.

-> First article in the series: On the Comparability of Law and Software

Legal Practice is Digitizing, but...

My parents have been running a law firm in a small town in the Taunus region since the 1980s. In May 2005, I started studying law. I remember that there used to be a waiting room in my parents' law firm where clients often sat waiting for their appointment with one of the lawyers. An image that today reminds you more of a doctor's office than a law firm. There were also huge filing cabinets that our secretaries rummaged through with impressive speed: Click, click, click, here's the Meier vs. Schulze file...

A lot has definitely changed since 2005, and even more since the 80s. Today, all documents are stored digitally on a server in our law firm and are accessible through law firm software. Clients practically never come to the office premises anymore: Everything can be discussed by phone and email.

Digitization Creates a New Class of Problems

However, new problems have emerged with digitization:

The file size of a PDF, for example, suddenly matters. Even before, a 255-page prosecution file (affectionately called an armadillo) made the secretariat groan, but the postal service didn't refuse to deliver it just because the file was 300 grams over a limit they defined. Different today: Most email providers set a transmission limit between 10 and 20 megabytes.

When it comes to signing documents, it becomes clear that we are currently still in this strange, undefined in-between world – still a bit in the past and not quite arrived in the present. Even without legal form requirements that would mandatorily require a handwritten signature, it is customary for certain documents to bear a real signature (powers of attorney, for example, but also assignment declarations demanded by insurance companies in the context of reduction disputes...). As a result, clients print out digitally sent forms, sign them on their kitchen table, and then send them as photographed file attachments by email. Each page of the five-page document as a separate image.

Embedded graphics in emails are the final boss for any secretarial staff member. Image attachments in emails can be sent in two different ways: As "normal" attachments or as so-called inline attachments. In this case, the image files are embedded graphics within an HTML email. Depending on the law firm software and email program used (the combination of Advoware and Microsoft Outlook is particularly toxic), it may be necessary to save each graphic individually via Right-click → Save image as... → Select location and assign name. Only then can the file now stored in a folder be imported into the law firm software. For emails with 10 or more images attached in this way, this can easily take 10 minutes.

On the topic of secure document exchange via email, there are probably more myths in the legal profession than encrypted emails actually sent. On one hand, lawyers are confronted with the requirements of variously interpreted data protection laws and professional rules, and at the same time they face a clientele that is largely uninterested in data protection, for whom dealing with their legal issue is more of a nuisance than a pleasure anyway: Please just send the relevant documents by email, like everyone does!

Data security is also a concern for the legal profession. The idea of becoming a victim of a ransomware attack and losing all data or even leaking data to the public through a data breach is a constant underlying fear of law firm owners. Interestingly, the sources of information on this very complex topic as a whole are often limited: Either it's law firm software vendors promoting the switch to their (usually more expensive) cloud with the argument of increased security, or it's general information and advice that, while often correct in themselves, don't convey an overarching picture: Don't accept USB sticks, turn off macros, and make regular backups.

Law Firms Should Take IT Into Their Own Hands

When I encountered the above problems as a young lawyer in the family law practice, I naturally looked for solutions. Over time, I found and implemented various solutions for some of the problems mentioned. Ultimately, dealing with these issues led to me founding Maramia GmbH together with Raui Ghazaleh: We now offer the solutions originally developed for ourselves to other colleagues. Interest in our solutions is expectedly high.

Your Own Law Firm Cloud with Nextcloud

How do you securely share large files with clients? How do you receive large or many files from clients? How do you copy a large brief with attachments to a laptop for the weekend that isn't connected to the law firm software? Where do you actually collect all the internal law firm knowledge? Where do you store passwords for all the various services used in the law firm?

We switched to a self-hosted instance of Nextcloud quite early.

Nextcloud is an open-source solution for data synchronization and sharing, developed as a secure alternative to commercial cloud services. The software enables law firms to operate their own private cloud infrastructure, with all data remaining under the complete control of the law firm. Especially for the legal sector, where data protection and confidentiality have top priority, Nextcloud offers decisive advantages: From secure file storage to calendar and contact management to document editing and collaborative work, the platform covers numerous functions that make everyday law firm life easier. Unlike with external cloud providers, law firms retain full sovereignty over their sensitive client data while also benefiting from modern cloud functions without having to compromise on data security.

We probably use only a fraction of Nextcloud's capabilities and operate it alongside (and separately from) our actual law firm software. Contact management, email traffic, and case management remain untouched in our law firm software. Nevertheless: When it comes to securely (https) exchanging larger amounts of data with third parties, a download link is quickly created. Conversely, we receive files via an equally easily generated upload link.

Internal Communication: Why Should Microsoft and Co. Be Allowed to Read Along?

Many companies rely on internal communication services such as Microsoft Teams. Here too, we switched to our own solution and thus retain sovereignty over our data. Within our own Nextcloud, the communication tool Talk runs. The law firm chat, quick data exchange (very popular: screenshots...) between lawyer and secretariat, and video calls internally and with external parties are covered securely and free of charge.

Signing Powers of Attorney Digitally

I'm aware that there are numerous very good solutions that offer legally secure digital signing. If you need to be able to prove with legal certainty that a specific person made a specific statement, the solution presented below is not sufficient. Nevertheless: Replacing a document that was emailed, printed, signed, and then photographed again can be done without loss of evidence by integrating a corresponding workflow on the law firm website.

For websites based on WordPress (an estimated 45% of all websites worldwide are created with WordPress), this can be implemented quite easily with a forms plugin, a PDF creation plugin, and a bit of custom JavaScript. The workflow of obtaining a digital power of attorney from the client is thus reduced to sending a link or telling the client to navigate to https://lawfirmwebsite.com/power-of-attorney with their smartphone and sign a power of attorney there.

Processing Email Attachments Efficiently

The overall complex of email attachments has repeatedly occupied me in my legal practice. We use Advoware in our law firm. Without wanting to say anything bad about Advoware, it is quite annoying that email import fails with inline attachments (see above). These are simply not recognized.

I first wrote a program and published it as open-source software (https://github.com/rakurtz/msg-pic-extract), which could extract all inline attachments from emails. This eliminates the manual saving of each embedded graphic by right-clicking.

While this little helper was useful, the overarching problem was not solved. How do several poorly photographed documents with lots of margins that are mostly rotated incorrectly (insert examples) become finished PDFs that look like perfect scans and whose text is searchable and selectable?

That was the birth of MaraDocs. It quickly became clear to us that this was a larger undertaking and that we didn't want to script it together as a "little helper", but rather create a mature software that we could also offer to our colleagues in the legal profession.

After a year of development, it was ready. MaraDocs was released as browser-based software in mid-March 2025.

Optimize, Combine, Download

The workflow is consistently aligned with the needs of everyday law firm life: It must be fast and easy!

• Drag email with attachments or files via drag & drop or copy & paste into the app
• All attachments are automatically extracted and analyzed
• Documents are automatically recognized, cropped, and converted into searchable scans
• PDFs are compressed, text recognition is performed if necessary
• All pages are automatically aligned and rotated according to text direction
• Pages can be easily combined into new PDFs
• Renaming is just a single click
• Download. Done.

Enthusiastic Feedback from Law Firms

We have been using MaraDocs in our law firm for three months now. Especially in the morning when processing incoming mail, it has become an indispensable tool for us, massively increasing efficiency in handling incoming documents.

Our first customers are equally enthusiastic. I'm particularly pleased with the feedback from a colleague in family law: MaraDocs saves her personally (as a lawyer!) about 45 minutes every day that she previously spent manually sorting documents in different programs.

As a lawyer who is driven crazy by technical inefficiencies, this feedback pleases me doubly: On one hand, of course, because our software is well received and solves a real problem, but at the same time because we were able to free a colleague from a rather mindless part of her work, thus freeing up more time for the legal part.

What's Next

In the next article, I'll report on how I myself got into programming and present some projects. It will probably be an enthusiastic article about the creative freedom in creating software, about the freedom of inner expression through code, lifelong learning, and all the other wonderful things of nerddom :)