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Mastering And Managing Documents

By T. Roe Frazer II
September 01, 2005

The attorney's own realm is no different from any other revenue-generating quarter — e-commerce or good old-fashioned bricks and cement — in one truism of the Technology Age: Document management is the most daunting challenge for today's law office. Regardless of the size of the law firm, mountains of file folders and forests of paper are piling up daily in every law office as quickly, and as momentously, as in the offices of their clients. Traditionally, the answer to this challenge has been to hire more clerical staff, more paralegals, and more attorneys and then to scramble to assess and assign outsourcing contracts to help erode some of the paper mountains popping up all around the legal-office landscape.

But that response has been less than optimal because the information contained in the documents and, in the area of litigation, handlers' knowledge of the evidence, has become disparate and widely distributed among many people. A more desirable document-management schema is one in which each person responsible for exercising or acquiring knowledge of a particular matter knows all the vital information and all the critical documents.

That being the case, the only way to master the evidence in a meaningful way is through document-management software or a workable, reliable Web-based system. These systems give each member of a law-practice group or litigation team easy access to the same knowledge base. One main goal of using document-management software is to eliminate endless search missions for the documents or files. An appropriately configured system provides immediate relief to staff from carrying boxes of documents, and makes attorneys' and other authorized personnel's laptops portals that provide instant access to every document, even in cases involving millions of pages.

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