Legal professionals at a small law firm – no less than at a large one – have to be able to find and reuse documents relevant to their tasks with time and minimal effort.  Yet they may not have the time or resources to build a brief bank or a forms library, nor the budget to purchase a knowledge management (KM) solution.

At Moffatt Thomas Barrett Rock & Fields CHTD., a small firm that provides legal services to clients in the business, litigation and regulatory areas, we found the answer:  a document management system (DMS).  Our professionals simply search our DMS and quickly find relevant documents that meet their criteria, a search that results in a de facto brief bank.  They can reuse existing documents or research and update them for current law and customize them for the matter at hand, saving time and money for our clients.  Our clients get a document that is well thought out and relevant, yet the time it takes to craft that document is far less than if we started from scratch.

Our goal in building a DMS was not simply to provide a location for documents, but also to create a tool that would allow us to capture, organize and store the knowledge and experiences of individual workers and make this information available to others in the organization.  When we speak of a DMS, we are really referring to KM.  The simple process of saving a document in a DMS exposes every piece of institutional knowledge that our firm generates.

In addition to finding documents, we can also tackle the number one trend listed in an article in the January 2007 issue of Intelligent Enterprise, which is to "capture expertise before boomers retire."1   The article mentions that the "bigger problem will be transforming routine collaboration without forcing uncomfortable changes in work habits …  or introducing heavy-handed debriefings that might scare older workers not quite ready to retire"2.

We also make our professionals more efficient through these technologies.  In a recent survey, Accenture found that more than 1,000 "middle managers spend more than a quarter of their time searching for information necessary to their jobs and when they do find it, it is often wrong"3.  Other difficulties found in the survey include that "the majority of managers in the survey said they store their most valuable information on their computer or individual e-mail accounts, with only 16 percent using a collaborative workplace"4.

Document Management Versus File Folders
Let's assume for now that we want to easily find and reuse our organizational intellectual property.  To accomplish this, a file folder directory structure is not effective after a firm reaches a certain size because search results become unwieldy.

As a firm, we have invested in training our users on what to name their documents in order to appropriately describe them.  However, a well crafted subject line does not alone allow for an effective search.  Every document in our system is also profiled with a series of labels to make them easier to filter.  Before we start drafting a new document, we want to find the best "Motion for Summary Judgment" on a particular topic in the correct court, and a DMS search should give this to us.

File folder systems do not give us the metadata we need to narrow down the searches in order to give us the results we require.  The properties discussed below show the added value of a DMS.

To work, every document in the DMS must have a set of attributes associated with it, such as the author's name, creation date and document type.  These attributes are called document properties and are contained in the property sheet.  Document properties are used for categorizing and finding documents.

When each document is first saved into the DMS, the property sheet must be filled out and every document must be assigned a subject, document type, author and client/matter number.  The information entered into the property sheet is the intelligence that forms the base of your KM solution and are the fields you search in addition to the text of the document.

Your DMS property sheet might include the following fields:  Subject, Comments, Author, Document Type, Client and Matter.  In addition, your document types for client-related documents might include the following types depending on your areas of practice:

FAX:  Fax Cover Sheet
FORM-OFFICE:  Customized and personalized office forms [SHARING RIGHTS RESTRICTED]
INDEX:  Indices, including pleading boards, case management folders, document indices
LAW:  Downloaded or scanned - case law, case summaries, statutes (all unadulterated)
LEG:  Legislative documents - summary of noteworthy bills, legislative letters, legislative forms
LTR:  Letter
MEMO:  Memoranda including research memos
NCM:  New Case Memo
PLD:  Pleading
WITNESS:  Witness statements, depositions, deposition notes, deposition checklists, list of deposition exhibits

Additionally, if a document does not fit a particular document type, one of the following practice areas codes could be used:

BK:  Bankruptcy
BUS:  Business
EMP:  Employment law
EP:  Estate planning
GA:  Governmental affairs
LIT:  Litigation

The key to a good DMS is to restrict the document types available to the users.  A shortened list reduces the users' confusion as to what document types to use for a given document.

Properties of a DMS
While shopping for a new document management system, it became clear that the term "document management system" required definition before meeting with a vendor, and led us to identify the following items as "required" functionality in our firm's DMS.

Check-in/check-out - prevents editing when someone else is modifying the document

Activity log - a list of all activity in that document (e.g., open, view, save)

Document security - restrict document access to one or more parties

Client and matter validation - an updatable list with a parent/child relationship between the client/matter that we are so familiar with in our firm

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions
Before you move toward a DMS, here are a couple of critical decisions that must be made:

All access or no access – Does your firm's culture allow a default for everyone's access to all documents, or only to those with permission?  Keep in mind that users can only find documents that they have rights to view.

Document types – How many, what are they, and what if more are needed?  Our firm went from over 40 document types to 22 because with so many document types, our users were sometimes confused about which type to use.  The right number depends on the firm culture and the type(s) of law practiced.  Two are not enough; 40 are probably too many.

KM at No Additional Charge
As technology professionals serving lawyers, we owe it to our organizations to drive value, and this is one way that we can dramatically add value to a daily task.  A properly filled-out property sheet has the ability to quickly refine a search to display the appropriate document(s).

We can put the intellectual property of the firm on display though a DMS and allow it to be used to serve our clients with only two steps.  First, save the document in the DMS and second, fill in a property sheet with the right information to generate search results that are meaningful to your organization.

Through the use of a document management system that shares knowledge, we're finding that our firm decreases costs for our clients, captures the wisdom of our critical intellectual property, and cuts the time it takes to search for documents.  For a small firm like ours, that's a BIG accomplishment.

ENDNOTES
1 http://www.intelligententerprise.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=196603897
2 Ibid.
3 http://newsroom.accenture.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=4484
4 Ibid.

About our author . . .

Marshall S. Major is the IT Manager at Moffatt Thomas Barrett Rock & Fields, CHTD., a 45-attorney firm in Boise, Idaho.  He has a MS in Management Information Systems from Boise State University.  He has served law firms for over 13 years, and if it plugs into the wall, it is his responsibility.  Marshall can be contacted at msm@moffatt.com.