Whether it really downloads from the court portal, what happens to your documents and credentials, and what it is not.
Yes. You keep your case list in an Excel spreadsheet that the app hooks onto, and LHT DMS signs in to EFS with the credentials you have entered, works through your cases and saves every document filed in them — yours and the other side's — into the folder you have nominated for that case. Each file is renamed with its enclosure number and date. Run it again the next day and it takes only what is new. We are not aware of any other software that downloads directly from the Malaysian EFS portal.
EFS itself allows download by hand, one document at a time. Step by step: How to download all your documents from Malaysian EFS.
Yes. The CE-File tab works the same way: claim references in your spreadsheet, filed documents downloading into your own folders, unlocked, OCR'd, compressed and renamed with the filing date and sequence number. The tab you see is set by the jurisdiction your licence is registered for — EFS (MY) for Peninsular Malaysia, EKSS (MY) for Sabah & Sarawak, and CE (GB) for England & Wales.
CE-File itself allows download by hand, one document at a time. Step by step: How to download all your documents from CE-File.
Yes. From 5 October 2026 the Court and Case Category fields on CE-File use the names of the new Business and Property Division. LHT DMS version 1.0.13, released the same morning, comes with the new lists. If you made your Cases-Folders Spreadsheet with an earlier version, create a new one from the CE (GB) tab and enter your cases in it.
Details: CE-File changed on 5 October 2026: what changed and what to do.
Yes. The EKSS tab works the same way for e-Kehakiman Sabah & Sarawak: your State, case numbers and folders in your spreadsheet, and every filed document downloaded into your own folders, OCR'd, compressed and renamed with its enclosure number, document name and filing date. An enclosure the court has held back is skipped, listed in the System Log, and collected on a later run once released.
Step by step: How to download all your documents from EKSS.
No, and it never will without you. The software brings the court file down to you and prepares your bundle so the portal will accept it. Uploading and filing stay entirely in your hands. Nothing is ever submitted to a court in your name.
Nowhere. Every document is processed on your own computer. The web tools on this site run inside your browser and upload nothing. Apart from licence activation, update checks, and any OCR languages or LibreOffice you choose to add, none of which carries your documents, the only network activity is the e-Filing download itself, which talks directly to the court's own servers from your machine, exactly as you would if you signed in by hand. Your portal username and password stay on your own computer and are passed only to the court's portal. By default they sit in your own spreadsheet; from version 1.0.21 you can keep the password out of it, in Windows Credential Manager or the Mac login keychain, with 'Save login on this computer'. There is no cloud copy of your case file and nothing is routed through Legal Hi Tech.
For IT and security teams: LHT DMS security and data flow, with every network connection the app makes.
You. The app is a tool you sign in with, as your browser is, or a password manager that fills in your login, or copy and paste. You start each download yourself, with your own login; the app signs in only as you, sees only what your account can see, and files nothing. Order 63A of the Rules of Court 2012, which governs e-filing in Malaysia, says nothing about the tool used to sign in. What it requires, in rule 6, is that each registered user keeps his authentication code confidential and does not divulge it or let anyone else use it, in Sabah and Sarawak as in Peninsular Malaysia. So each lawyer should sign in with his own login, not a firm-wide one such as the managing partner's, and a clerk who downloads from EFS for you should sign in with his own EFS login, which your firm's EFS Administrator can create, not with yours.
Where a firm shares one Cases-Folders spreadsheet: court-portal credentials, on the security page.
That is what it is built for. A Peninsular Malaysian EFS bundle must be portrait, A4, unlocked, with annotations flattened, links cleared, and under 50 MB. Miss any one and the portal hands it back, which is how a single filing turns into a night of adjusting and re-uploading. LHT DMS applies every one of those requirements as the bundle is compiled, in one pass, and splits into volumes with continuous page numbering where a single file will not fit. We are not aware of any other software that produces an EFS-compliant bundle in a single pass. Those restrictions are peculiar to Peninsular Malaysia. Sabah & Sarawak's EKSS CMS-A accepts a PDF up to 20 MB without them, so a bundle for those courts is prepared to the lighter regime automatically.
Step by step: Why EFS rejects your PDF, and how to fix it.
Yes. CE-File will accept almost any document, but the Courts and Tribunals Judiciary's General Guidance on Electronic Court Bundles sets out what the bundle itself must look like. LHT DMS produces pagination running sequentially from page 1 so the number stamped on the page matches the PDF page number, an index hyperlinked to every document it lists, bookmarks carrying a short description and the page number, OCR on typed text, landscape pages left in landscape so they read left to right, and 150 DPI output below the 300 DPI ceiling. Several established products also produce compliant bundles for England & Wales; we make no claim to be alone there.
The courts set the limits, not the software, and all three differ. Peninsular Malaysia (EFS) accepts up to 50 MB per PDF. Sabah & Sarawak (EKSS CMS-A) limit it to 20 MB per PDF. England & Wales (CE-File) allows up to 100 MB per PDF in the Civil Courts, though it may be 50 MB in the Family courts and certain tribunals. LHT DMS already knows which applies to you: the volume-split threshold arrives set to 49.5 MB for Peninsular Malaysia, 19.7 MB for Sabah & Sarawak and 99 MB for England & Wales, just under each ceiling. Where a bundle will not fit, it splits into volumes with page numbering running continuously across them, so it reads as one document even when filed as three. The figure is yours to change if your registry is stricter. The software itself imposes no limit on file size or page count at any point.
Step by step: How to split a bundle into volumes.
Three of them, in fact, and the app already knows which is yours. Peninsular Malaysian EFS is the strict one: landscape pages must be turned to portrait and every hyperlink stripped out, or the portal rejects the bundle. Neither restriction applies in Sabah & Sarawak, where EKSS CMS-A accepts a PDF up to 20 MB without them, and both are the wrong thing to do for England & Wales, where a landscape page must stay landscape so it reads left to right and the index must keep the hyperlinks the Judiciary's guidance requires. So rotation and link clearing arrive switched on for Peninsular Malaysia and switched off for the other two. Rendering to A4 arrives switched on for all three: compulsory for Peninsular Malaysia, and preferable though not required elsewhere. LHT DMS reads the jurisdiction your licence is registered for and sets all of it before you touch anything. Every option remains yours to override for a particular run.
No, despite the name. iManage, NetDocuments and M-Files are enterprise repositories: they store matters, enforce retention policies and provide audit trails and matter-centric governance. LHT DMS does none of that and is not trying to. It is a document production tool for litigators — it gets the court file in, and gets a compliant, bookmarked, paginated bundle out. If your firm runs iManage, LHT DMS sits alongside it rather than replacing it.
No. It does not run your matters, manage your diary, host hearings or provide a client portal. It does the document work around those systems. Firms using a litigation platform for case management commonly want something separate for bundle production; that is the gap this fills.
Yes. The Draft Index tab builds a Word index from the file names in your case folder: the number, the description and the date, with the page numbers counted from the files themselves. Because it is a Word document, you can edit it. When documents are added, Update List & Pages adds the new rows in blue and re-counts the pages without altering anything you have written.
Step by step: How to create a court bundle index in Word from your file names.
Yes. Folder Manager, opened from the Draft Index tab, shows every file in the case folder in one grid. Name an exhibit '2+A' and it is merged into item 2; name a new document '3A' and it takes its place after item 3. Renumber with Merge Groups then merges them and renames the files so that they run 1, 2, 3 with no gaps, showing you every change before it makes it. Only the number at the front of each name changes, and the original of every file merged or removed is kept in a DMS Backup folder, never deleted.
Step by step: How to add a late document to a numbered case folder, and renumber the rest.
Yes, and it is one of the features advocates tend to notice first. Mark the places in your Word submission, skeleton argument or witness statement with a single underscore for documents or a double underscore for authorities, and LHT DMS writes the correct bundle page numbers into them, optionally with a p. or pp. prefix. When the bundle changes, you re-run it.
Step by step: How to write bundle page references into your skeleton argument.
You do not rebuild the bundle. The Replace Pages tab takes the signed page, matched by the page number in its filename, and drops it into the finished bundle in place of the unsigned one. Pagination and bookmarks are preserved.
Step by step: How to replace signed pages without rebuilding the bundle.
They hold. The page numbers stamped on the sheets when the bundle was compiled are part of the page itself, so they never shift - and LHT DMS keeps the PDF’s searchable page labels in step with them. Remove page 12 from a paginated bundle on the Organise tab and the sheets either side still read 11 and 13, matching what is printed on them, instead of silently renumbering the way most PDF tools do. Pages you insert after page 12 are labelled 12A, 12B, which is how a lawyer numbers pages added to a bundle already before the court. Extract pages 512 to 515 of a volume and they still read 512 to 515 on their own. So going to a page by its bundle number takes you to the right sheet, whatever you have done to the document since.
Step by step: How to make the PDF page number match the bundle page number.
Only if you ask it to — and there are two different things you can ask for. Flattening keeps every highlight, comment and stamp but fixes it permanently into the page, which is what Peninsular Malaysian EFS requires, since it will not accept live annotations. Clearing removes the mark-up altogether, for when you want a clean copy without your working notes before it goes to the other side or the court. Clear Annotations is off by default and shown in red so that it is always a deliberate choice. On Process Files, which overwrites your files, the warning before it runs tells you the mark-up will go, and your originals keep theirs in a DMS Backup folder. Process Pages writes new files and never touches the source, and Compile applies it only to the bundle it is building. When Clear Annotations is ticked, the options that would otherwise flatten drop the word from their labels, so you can always see which one you are getting.
The desktop app is free for all of 2026, with unlimited files and unlimited file sizes. There is no account to create and no credit card to enter. You tell us the jurisdiction you practise in, and your download link and licence key arrive by email. The web tools on this site are free and need no licence at all.
Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit), or macOS 15.7.9 Sequoia or later on Apple Silicon (Intel Macs are not supported). 4 GB of RAM minimum, 8 GB recommended, and about 1.5 GB of disk space. It is a desktop application, not a web service.
Not on Windows, unless you want it installed for everyone who uses the computer. From version 1.0.21, Setup asks whether to install it for you alone or for all users. For you alone, the default, it goes into your own programs folder and needs no administrator rights. For all users, an administrator installs it in Program Files, and its updates then need an administrator's approval too. IT teams can make the choice on the command line with /CURRENTUSER or /ALLUSERS, and install silently with /VERYSILENT /SUPPRESSMSGBOXES. Earlier versions install for the signed-in user only. On a Mac, it is installed by dragging it into Applications, as Mac apps usually are.
For IT and security teams: installation, licences and updates.
Whichever your jurisdiction uses, set automatically when you register. The app uses US Letter for the United States, Canada, Mexico and the other countries that use it, and A4 everywhere else. It applies wherever pages are brought to a standard size, to blank pages it adds, and to the Word page of the court index.
Yes. LHT DMS is new, and some antivirus products - notably McAfee and Norton - hold back software they have not yet seen often, even when it is clean. The installer is digitally signed by Legal Hi Tech Limited, and every version is checked by about 70 security engines on VirusTotal and submitted to Microsoft and McAfee before it is published. If your antivirus stops it, restore the file from the antivirus's quarantine (in McAfee: See quarantined files, then Restore) and run it again, or contact us and we will help.
No. The desktop app has no limit on the number of files or on file size. The free web tools on this site do have limits, because they run inside your browser — the comparison table on the features page sets out exactly what each one can do.
LHT DMS was written by a ranked practising barrister active in Malaysia and in England & Wales, over more than a decade, as private tools for his own litigation practice. It was rebuilt as a single commercial suite much later and released publicly in 2026. It was in daily use in a working practice for years before it was ever offered for sale.
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