How to Organize Everything: What to Look For in a Document Management System
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For more articles and tips on the latest in technology for lawyers, check out the CBA PracticeLink supplement produced in coordination with the July/August 2008 issue of National.
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To successfully implement a document management system, lawyers need to understand two key facts that have nothing to do with technology: “documents” refers to far more than just printed text, and office-wide enforcement of a single standard is fundamentally important.
These were the key concepts set forth at the session “Document management in the digital law office,” a presentation at ABA TECHSHOW 2008 by Steve Best, a law office technology consultant and CEO of Best Law Firm Solutions Inc., and Debbie Foster, a legal technology and management consultant and president of InTouch Legal.
“Documents” in a law office now refers to a dizzying array of print and (mostly) electronic items that go far beyond memos and correspondence: spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, photographs, sound files, e-mails, voice mails, Blackberry messages, and more. With 90% of all documents never seeing the printed page, technology is essential to managing all this data.
But one of the major flaws in many current firms’ document management schemes is that there is no enforcement of a single approach to organizing information. The only truly effective DM system is one that makes compliance involuntary. Human nature is such that staff will always look for a way to get around the new system of naming, filing and locating documents in order to use their own traditional favourites. In this sense, successful document management is really an office culture issue.
Best and Foster went on to list 12 features lawyers should look for in a good DM system, including:
- a lockdown system that prevents users from circumventing the policy and substituting their own methods;
- full text searching and speed searching, for the quickest and most comprehensive access to the right data;
- mirroring, or off-line data access, allowing you to use the system from a laptop, a flash drive, or a client’s office;
- security algorithms that allow you to restrict access to certain documents, folders or functions; and
- scanning and imaging capabilities that work with your existing office systems to reduce the overall paper accumulation.
Among the document management products suggested by the speakers were WORLDOX, Interwoven, DocsOpen and NetDocuments.
— Jordan Furlong
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