What lands in a law firm inbox every day
Messages from the German secure attorney inbox carry attachments that are often just called Anlage_1.pdf or Nachricht.pdf after export. Add scanned court mail, opposing counsel briefs, court orders, summonses, cost assessment decisions, commercial register extracts and documents clients send in later by email. Each of these belongs to exactly one matter, and each carries the necessary information in its text: file reference, court, parties, date. Just not in the filename. That is the gap automatic renaming closes before the file is stored or imported into a document management system.
Two file references, one filename
Almost every matter carries two identifiers: your internal reference and the court's, for example 5 O 128/24. The court reference contains spaces and a slash, and a slash is not permitted in a filename. In your naming pattern you replace it with a hyphen and close the spaces, so the component becomes 5-O-128-24. It stays readable, stays searchable and works on Windows and macOS alike. The internal reference goes before or after it, depending on which one your team searches for more often.
The date on the letter is not the start of the deadline
A leading date in YYYY-MM-DD format sorts the matter chronologically without anyone changing the view settings. What matters is which date you mean. Filery reads the date out of the document, which is usually the date of the brief or the order. Statutory deadlines, however, run from service of process. If you need both, put the document date in the filename and keep proof of service where it belongs: in your deadline calendar. The filename organizes the files, it does not replace deadline control.
Matter files, retention and handover
Under section 50 of the German Federal Lawyers Act, matter files must be kept for six years after the end of the calendar year in which the mandate ended. Over that period case handlers change, trainees contribute, individual matters are passed on. A filename only the original handler understands loses its value at exactly that moment. Descriptive names with client, document type and date keep an archived matter readable years later without anyone asking around. That helps both when releasing files to the client and when handing a matter to another firm.
Confidentiality: how the analysis actually works
Filery opens the PDF on your machine and reads out the text. That content is transmitted encrypted for AI analysis, and what comes back are the detected fields: sender, date, document type, subject. Renaming happens on your device again, and the files themselves are not stored permanently. For law firms, engaging service providers is governed by section 43e of the Federal Lawyers Act; the review and the contractual arrangements remain your responsibility. If you want the analysis to run through your own keys with a provider you choose, use the Custom plan with your own API keys.
Preview, batches and history
Before every rename you see the suggestion and confirm it, either file by file or for a whole folder at once. In a law firm that is not a convenience but a requirement: a misfiled brief costs more than the minute you saved. For scanned court mail without a text layer, OCR can be switched on. Every rename is recorded in the app's history, so it stays traceable what a file was originally called. You define the naming pattern once, for example date_client_documenttype.
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Windows
Windows 10 & 11
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