Legal Document Management: Getting It Right at Last

After years of false starts, document management has finally become a reality for the legal profession. 

It’s no secret that the law has not traditionally been seen as a technology-intensive field. While industries from manufacturing to investment banking were being transformed by state-of-the-art systems, the turn of the 21st century found much of the legal profession still relying on the same kind of paper files that had been around since the horse-and-buggy days.

Documents pertaining to a given matter were categorised into manila folders, which were placed in turn into an expandable file. On the outside of this file were written various identifying data such as client name and originating attorney. Stored in a steel file cabinet, the matter file was easily accessible by anyone who needed it (assuming that the person was physically in the office that day, and that the file itself wasn’t already in use, misfiled or lost).

For all its low-tech quaintness, the paper file did have certain virtues. Having evolved over centuries of legal custom, it was well-suited to the needs of both law firms and attorneys. It was simple to use, providing an intuitive way to organise and locate matter content. It could hold all types of items side-by-side – document drafts, memoranda, legal briefs, photographs, handwritten notes, financial records and so forth. It also provided a straightforward foundation for records management.

And fundamentally, the paper file worked. Attorneys understood how to use it, and did so with great effectiveness – more than could be said for the early document management (‘DM’) systems that sought to render it obsolete. In fact, for many years, DM vendors struggled to match the success of physical filing systems in working as advertised. Only recently have they got it right – ironically, by turning for inspiration to that same old paper file.

The First Step – Into a Big Bucket

For all the field-tested effectiveness of the paper file, it was overdue for an upgrade by the time the Information Age came along. As firms grew larger, it became increasingly time consuming and difficult to locate specific content – especially in multi-office firms. Costs for storing, copying and transporting paper files were rising, while the maintenance of multiple sets of documents introduced the possibility of version control errors and other problems. Even before the introduction of more stringent records retention and e-discovery requirements, the vulnerability of paper filing systems to loss and damage had begun to pose an unacceptable risk.

The first DM systems offered a simple solution: put all of a firm’s matter-related content in one centrally accessible location, and give users in all locations an easy way to search and access it. Add a layer of access control, search and check-in/check-out functionality, and you’re all set.

The problem was, these first-generation attempts didn’t really fulfil either of the promises. Dumped into a ‘Big Bucket’ repository, matter-related content wasn’t as easy to find as it was supposed to be; accurate searches were difficult to construct, especially for attorneys more accustomed to the simplicity of opening a file cabinet.

Then again, even the biggest bucket didn’t really hold all of the content pertaining to a given matter. E-mails, paper correspondence, images and other types of content remained scattered in other locations across the organisation, from silo’d servers to individual desktops to file rooms, unsearchable and inaccessible to most members of the firm.

Even given these limitations, early DM systems might still have proved useful in enabling access and collaboration around a finite subset of a firm’s matter-related content, except for another, more basic problem: users hated them.

Giving Users What They Didn’t Want

No busy professional ever welcomes the arrival of an IT staffer with new software to install. Amid talk of improved productivity and enhanced capabilities, all the user really wants to know is: how much is this going to disrupt the way I’m accustomed to working – and do I really have to do it? In the case of early DM systems, the promised firm-wide benefits were all too abstract to overcome more pragmatic obstacles to adoption.

The effectiveness of DM depends in large part on the willingness of individual users to consistently place their content into the system. Peering into the dark recesses of their firm’s new Big Bucket, many attorneys decided they preferred to keep crucial documents closer at hand on local hard drives. For those willing (or forced) to use the new system, another problem arose: the profile forms prompting them to assign identifying information to each item placed in the repository. Pressed for time, few attorneys stopped to ponder the importance of accurate metadata for making content searchable. More often, they simply entered 9999 for client ID and similarly garbled data for other fields just to get the profile form out of the way.

Of course, they paid the price later, when the lack of good metadata forced them to use full-text searches that took forever to process and returned thousands of near-misses instead of the one accurate result they needed, and whole categories of content remained beyond the reach of even the most precise searches. And the organisation paid the price as well, as mutually reinforced user frustration and resistance rendered the costly, long-awaited DM system largely useless.

Meanwhile, the need for more effective DM grew still more urgent. As firms reorganised by practice group rather than geography, attorneys had to be able to collaborate and share resources across multiple offices. The volume of information to be managed kept rising, and it now came in new forms – e-mail, electronic documents, audio files, faxes, scanned images – making it virtually impossible to keep all the information on a matter together, organised and up-to-date. E-mail posed a particular problem, representing a large proportion of matter-related correspondence and content yet lying beyond the reach of traditional DM systems. As firms faced unprecedented requirements for compliance and e-discovery, and felt increasing pressure for profitability in highly competitive markets, firms became desperate for the increased productivity and reduced risk they’d long been promised.

DM vendors were still hard at work. From one release to the next, they added new interfaces, workflows and other bells and whistles that were valuable enough in theory – but still missed the point. Unless the core issue of user adoption could be addressed, the best technology in the world would go unused, its potential unrealised.

Matter-Centric Collaboration: The Paper File Goes Electronic

Having worked closely with legal customers for many years, Interwoven recognised the fundamental problem with most DM systems on the market: they started with a technology, then tried to apply it to a profession. This approach inevitably forced users to conform to the system and learn new ways of working in order to gain its benefits. It can look good on paper – but less so in the real-world offices where attorneys 
actually work.

Taking a new approach, Interwoven began by studying the way attorneys already worked, and determining how their current practices could be enhanced through technology – not replaced wholesale. Simply put, we decided to bring the timeless paper file into the Information Age. These efforts led to the development of a new paradigm for legal DM: matter-centric collaboration.

In many key ways, matter-centric collaboration retains the intuitive aspects of the traditional case filing system. An online workspace, analogous to an expandable file, is created for each matter. Within this workspace, electronic folders organise documents into various categories, replicating the hierarchical structure of manila folders. Instead of being limited to certain types of content, the matter-centric workspace holds all matter-related content side-by-side, including original documents, received briefs, correspondence, scanned images and other graphics, faxes, voicemails, billing and CRM data from external systems – and, crucially, e-mails, which can be managed and shared seamlessly within the same context as 
other content.

This electronic version of the case file is further enhanced with core DM functionality. Accessible securely from any location, the matter-centric workspace offers rich functionality to help users collaborate effectively around content, including tasks, calendar items, discussion threads, notes and links in the online case file itself. Users can access not only final documents, but also the thinking and discussions that went into them, including background information cited and the evolution of the document over time. Collaborative editing allows work in process to be circulated for input, then locked in final form.

A more intuitive organisational scheme goes a long way in making matter-centric collaboration more attorney-friendly than past DM models. Equally critical is its ability to make DM truly painless for users. Gone are the profile forms of the past; instead, users simply drag-and-drop documents, e-mails and other items into the same kind of hierarchical folder structure long familiar to Windows users, and metadata is assigned automatically based on location, user and other data from the case management system. As metadata accuracy improves dramatically, so does the ease and effectiveness of searching the repository.

Ultimately, matter-centric collaboration succeeds by making DM completely transparent to users. Attorneys don’t have to know how metadata is assigned, or the role it plays in DM. They don’t have to know what type of content an item is – e-mail, document, image – to know where to look for it. They don’t have to change the way they think about organising matter content. All they have to do is what comes naturally; the right thing to do has become the easiest thing to do.

Only the Beginning

After years of false starts, matter-centric collaboration has finally made the promise of DM a reality for the legal profession. By facilitating broad user adoption, matter-centric collaboration helps firms implement DM more effectively and consistently firm-wide, thus delivering immediate benefits around productivity, client service, compliance and risk reduction. Attorneys in any location have simple, reliable access to every part of the matter file. E-discovery has been transformed from a costly nightmare into a relatively routine process. Firms now have a robust framework for complying with the sweeping regulatory requirements of recent years, and can assure clients of the complete security, integrity and recoverability of their matter content.

Moving forward, the intuitive, consistently applied organisational scheme supported by matter-centric collaboration ensures that all of a firm’s content retains its full value and utility, as well as preserving vital institutional knowledge and experience even as individual attorneys come and go. Together, the structure of matter-centric collaboration and the content it manages provide a foundation for a host of new DM initiatives: unified records management, client extranets, knowledge management, disconnected use by mobile workers and more.

As these and other initiatives gain momentum in the years to come, firms will explore new ways of leveraging innovation for productivity and competitive advantage – and the notion of the legal profession being technology-averse will seem as outdated as the paper case file once did.

J Daniel Janzen

Interwoven, Inc