Document Management Software: The Electronic File Butler for the Law Office By Steven J. Best, Esq. January 2011 Choosing a document management system can be confusing and downright terrifying. In this article, Find out how the major document management system vendors can help your law office streamline your paperless efforts and workflow, and help you deliver efficient and high‐quality legal services to your clients. This "Best of ABA TECHSHOW ®" article was originally presented at ABA TECHSHOW 2010, the World's Premier Legal Technology Conference and Expo. It's just one example of the terrific content offered at ABA TECHSHOW by more than 50 legal technology experts. ABA TECHSHOW 2011 will be held April 11‐
13, 2011, at the Hilton Chicago. Get registration and other information at www.techshow.com . I. THE HISTORY OF DOCUMENT MANGEMENT A. In the Beginning A LOOOOOOOONG TIME AGO: In the beginning the office gods created filing cabinets, filing folders and typewriters. But Document Management really has been around for longer than that.  Ancient Libraries organized scrolls on shelves by topic (ex. The Vatican Library STILL, to this day, organizes its ancient scrolls on shelves by topic);  Later, the Dewey Decimal System developed to help us find books easier in more modern libraries. Dewey utilized a card catalog system to organize all of the knowledge in the library into ten (10) main classes. The ten classes were subdivided into ten additional sections, etc. The beauty of Dewey Decimal is that the categories are both purely numeric and infinitely hierarchal. This really was the first modern attempt at any sort of document management. And, most libraries STILL, to this day, adhere to this system;  As the business world progressed, busy secretaries and assistants would file papers systematically. The problem arose that different offices had different systems, different organizational structures and different location tools. While some offices organized documents and file folders alphabetically, others began using a combination of numbers and letters, and some when to a purely numeric system. (Some even used color coding). B. The Computer Age Early on large machines like the CPT, WANG and the like were invented and introduced into the Law Office. Along with CPT and WANG were humungous floppy discs that were inserted in and out of floppy disc drives multiple times per day. www.lawpracticetoday.org
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Then, Bill Gates emerged with the Personal PC, and there was a dawn of a new era, known as DOS. Documents continued to be organized on floppy disc drives and eventually on static internal drives then and now known as hard drives. Sometimes there was a manual card system advising office staff on which disk documents were stored. For example, a secretary at a firm where I formerly worked, Donna, would create documents in Word Perfect 5.1 and give word processing documents a name like SMITH.CPT (which would mean Smith Complaint). Her directory looked like this: o SMITH.CPT (which means Smith complaint) o SMITH.ANS (which means Smith answer) o SMITH.IN1 (which means Smith first interrogatories) o SMITH.IN2 (which means Smith second interrogatories) o SMITH.RPD (which means Smith request for production of documents) o SMITH.LT1 (which means Smith letter 1) o SMITH.LT2 (which means Smith letter 2) AND SO ON…… Donna’s system was simple and rudimentary. But for her time, she was quite the creative document manager because she was disciplined and organized. She knew her system and demanded that we all comply with it. By hitting F5 (which brought up your DOS list in Word Perfect 5.1), Donna was able to locate all documents relating to a certain client. So, props for Donna. A document manager before her time. C. Windows and Mac Systems As hard drives were introduced and documents could be stored on the static media inside the computer, also adopted was a folder structure that grew from an old IBM concept. And, because of the invention of the spreadsheet, the email, the presentation and, of course, the PDF, documents were no longer just documents anymore, but rather digital data units (DDU). The digital age was born. D. Modern Times Finally, in the 21st century, DDU’s became “records” and records represented bands of data which include documents, spreadsheets, PDF’s, presentations, movies, videos, graphic designs, pictures, music, etc. And with the ever increasing lists of DDU’s or records, where is everything and how can you find it? II. METHODS OF DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT The simplified definition of document management is managing the storage of digital media on a computer, network or web portal. As previously stated, documents may be anything from a traditional www.lawpracticetoday.org
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word processing document, a scanned PDF, a graphic image, a music/sound file, and/or an email. And again, the word “document” may not be nearly as accurate as the term electronic file, record, or digital data unit. PC Magazine defines document management as “The capture and management of documents within an organization. The term originally implied only the management of documents after they were scanned into the computer. Subsequently, it became an umbrella term that embraces document imaging, workflow, text retrieval and multimedia.” Document Management can be broken down by 4 basic categories: A. Manual Management Manual management is best described as the hit and miss protocol of allowing users to decide not only where documents will be stored (hard drive, server, floppy disk, thumb drive, or allowed to reside/live as an attachment to an email), but also what the document naming convention will be. This method relies upon a hope that everyone in the office will do things consistently. The result is a hodgepodge of DDU names and locations. Manual management (and we use the term management very loosely here) results in utter chaos, lots of wasted time locating documents, underdeveloped scanning and imaging policies, and emails stored on the local hard drive in a myriad of subfolders, typically within Outlook. B. Firm Enforced Protocols This is slightly more advanced that the prior method as this is a system where firm owners typically take some time to formulate policy as to how DDU’s will be named and how DDU’s will be stored. For example, the firm will teach (and hopefully provide written instructions to) a new employee to store a word processing DDU as [\\server\shared\docs\clientname\mattername\YYYY‐MM‐DD DDUNAME.DOCX]. But this system is only as good as employee compliance and enforcement. There is no guarantee that a rogue employee will store version 4 of a complex document on her C: drive in \My Documents. There still remains the issue of lost DDU’s, DDU’s stored in the wrong place, wrong folder, with the wrong name, saved over the wrong document, etc. And email management is typically not enforced and remain/live in a myriad of locations. C. Using a NON‐DMS Software as a DMS This method is semi‐document management. It is a hybrid between (a) and (b). For example, most case management systems (CMS), such as Amicus Attorney, Time Matters, Practice Master and the like offer “pointers” per se. If users store DDU’s within the protocols of the Case Management system, the “pointer” will remember where the document is stored. Some systems, like Time Matters, even include a document indexer that will scan and create a database of words so that users can search for DDUs within the CMS system. The drawback of the CMS substitute for a true DMS is the lack of forced compliance. Users may still very easily bypass the CMS saving structure leaving firm members hunting for documents. www.lawpracticetoday.org
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D. Using a true Document Management Software System Firms that deploy software to store documents away, index every word of every document and retrieve documents by easy search terms employ a forced compliance manager to ensure that DDU’s aren’t stored improperly or lost. This type of product forces consistency firm wide and users would be hard pressed to circumnavigate it. It will allow storage of any file type in a standard protocol – each DDU is “profiled” to include up to 7 required fields of information such as Client, Matter, Document Type and Author. And the DMS system indexes every word of every document, email, spreadsheet, readable PDF, etc. This allows for extremely fast and versatile search capabilities. Files may be searched based on profile criteria and/or using the full text in file searching. DMS products also have a myriad of other helpful and unique feature which we will discuss infra. III. DO YOU NEED DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE? So, the next step is to identify which of the 4 categories immediately above describe your firm and where, if anywhere, you wish to go from here. The big question is does your firm need, or would they benefit from, a true DMS? If so, which one? The following questions, though not all encompassing, may be a good place to start when trying to determine if your firm needs a true DMS product: A. Questions to Ask Yourself  Can everyone within the firm quickly and easily find not only their own documents, but documents generated by other users?  If not, how much time is typically wasted hunting down relevant documents? And, what is the value of that wasted time?  Can anyone in the office immediately “screen up” a list of documents and understand quickly and easily the nature of each, based on its title/name and last date modified?  Is it clear what client/matter any given document is associated with from either the file location or name?  Are documents consistently saved and named, including those that are scanned?  Are you able to easily locate documents of a certain type across your entire network? For example, if you wanted to search for all Motions in Limine within the firm, would you be able to do that and get accurate find results? Could you do it quickly by searching the “words” of the actual document?  How long does it take your system to conduct a find/search?  Do you control who can view/edit documents?  Would a full history of everyone who has opened/edited/printed/etc. a document be helpful to you (inclusive of dates/times)?  Are older, obsolete documents cluttering your network and backup? www.lawpracticetoday.org
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Do multiple users ever try to edit the same document and accidentally overwrite each other’s work? Can you easily preserve version history of your documents? To read and download the rest of this article, visit the Best of ABA TECHSHOW Archives at www.techshow.com/bestofabatechshow. www.lawpracticetoday.org
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