Where is that document?
That’s a question asked often by attorneys. It is quite common to have to refer to an older document or even to reuse parts of a previous document. But how quickly can you FIND all of your documents?
The standard procedure for those in smaller offices is to simply create a folder structure, often by client, and then with subfolders for different matters, different types of documents, etc. That can work reasonably well for smaller offices IF everyone diligently follows the same standards, and uses the same naming conventions for the documents themselves.
However, the more people creating documents, and the more documents that are created in any given period of time, and the longer that system is in place, the more difficult it will be to find anything. What happens when two or three years later, you need to find a document that was created for an earlier matter, but you don’t remember exactly for which client it was created? If all you can remember is that it was a similar case, you may either not be able to find the earlier document at ALL or it will take a lot of valuable – and expensive – time.
Another possible scenario is if a similar matter was handled by another attorney at your firm. You may not even KNOW who that original client was. Or you may not know for sure whether there WAS anything similar, which means you’d have to reinvent the wheel when there was already something sitting right there on your server.
There are document management systems that can handle all of the indexing, tagging, and storage of your documents and which can make it a LOT easier to find not only specific documents but documents that might match certain criteria. For instance, you might be able to find a document for a particular client containing a particular word or phrase.
Maybe it is time to talk to your IT provider about better ways of managing your documents.
