Records Management - Protecting Your Clients, Protecting Your Firm

It's time to bite the bullet and clean up your records and document management systems once and for all.  But where do you start?  There are paper documents, e-mail messages and website posts to organize, along with the usual amount of briefs, financial reports and billing files.  At minimum, a records management system should help attorneys and staff find what they're looking for without wasting an enormous amount of resources.

Then there are next steps.  To protect the firm from sanctions and possible loss of a client, you've also got to protect your documents.  Setting up confidentiality policies is a good first step, but there must also be a continuing communication of these policies among stakeholders.  One of our authors describes how at least one firm has learned this the hard way.

Firms should also be aware of new guidelines for litigation holds and understand their impact on a firm's records management systems and policies. It's worth studying what constitutes best practices in this area to create the most consistent and defensible method.

Our authors discuss the core challenges of records management - organizing records, protecting them from loss and protecting your firm from sanctions - and offer important considerations before taking the next steps towards creating a fully functional system.

Thank you to our authors for sharing their insights and to the organizers of this white paper who brought them all together.