SDM - Overview

Served Document Manager™ - Overview

Legal documents arrive from all directions — registered agents, headquarters or branch offices, mailrooms, uploaded by hand, or through ServePort, Safari's portal for voluntary service of process. Each channel tends to get handled differently, by different people, which makes it easy to lose track of what comes in, what it was, and where it went.

Served Document Manager™ (SDM) is purpose-built functionality that resolves the problem, it pulls the intake of every legal document into one place, no matter how it arrived, then, depending on your Company's preference, uses AI to identify what each document is and route it automatically. The result: a single, auditable, workflow that streamlines the intake of served documents from all sources.

SDM also solves a problem faced by financial institutions and companies with offices: paper service on those offices. Because you don't want to train office managers how to be lawyers, they will typically send both served documents and documents that look like legal documents but aren't. So this creates a challenge to sort out served documents (SDs) from non-served documents (NSDs). SDM solves that problem by using AI to automatically weed out NSDs, and either archive them or actually send them to a specific destination.

How Served Document Manager™ Works: Three Stages

1. Intake From Every Channel

The moment a file arrives - from any source - SDM captures it as an Intake Event and immediately gives it an Intake Event ID. Everything lives on the Intake Events page, where Triagers can see what's assigned to them, what's still unassigned, and what has recently been routed. If a document needs to be added by hand, you can upload files here too.

2. AI Identification and Classification

If your company has AI document identification enabled, SDM's AI does the heavy lifting. When a batch of documents is scanned or uploaded together, AI can tell you where one document ends and the next begins and classify each one, including whether it is a served document or a non-served document (NSD). Every Intake Event can be reviewed in the Document Viewer, where a Triager sees every document in the Intake Event and can split, merge or reclassify documents before finalizing.

3. Routing and Delivery

Once every document in an Intake Event has an action assigned, finalizing the event does several things at once: it splits the Intake Event into individual documents (both SDs and NSDs), gives each document its own Child ID, and routes each one to the correct processing system - automatically creating the right matter (such as a Garnishment or Levy matter). For NSDs, the default is that those are 'archived', but Safari can also configure customized routing for them as well.

Integrations

SDM can connect to one or more of your company's systems to support routing such as HR/Payroll, Matter Management, Customer Database, and more. See Setup - Automation with API Integrations for more information.

End-to-End Auditing

Because SDM is the single door every document comes through, it can track everything with a two-tier ID structure:

Intake Event ID: assigned the instant a file is received, before it's reviewed or classified.
Child ID: assigned to each individual document once it's finalized.

Together, these two IDs let you trace any document across its entire journey: from the moment it arrived, to exactly where it was ultimately delivered. Every Intake Event also keeps an Audit History showing changes to its details and who, or what, triggered routing. Two built-in Reports, one covering Intake Events and one covering Child IDs, give you visibility into volume, sources, and how long documents take to move from intake to routing.

Is there a question we haven't answered? Please send it to us at support@safarilaw.com