Legal records managers: ready for electronic prime time? Legal records managers working for firms that still rely on paper information systems must take the lead to move their firms into the electronic age.

• Author: Williams, Nancy A.
• Position: Industry Focus

When lawyers began using desktop computers in the early 1990s, some predicted they would be the first group to migrate from paper- to electronic-based information systems. Contrary to the prediction, the legal profession is likely still further from achieving a paperless system than are their corporate clients, perhaps because many lawyers are not yet comfortable with a completely electronic system. Therefore, law firms today continue to maintain two separate work-product systems: paper and electronic.

The Current Information System

Law firm information is currently organized in a client-matter-folder hierarchical system. First, each client is assigned a unique number, usually the next-available number in a client numbering series. Then, typically, each project, or matter, a lawyer performs for the client is sequentially assigned to the client's number. Together they are collectively referred to as the client-matter number. Finally, law firms will assign numbers to the various folders they create for each matter. The folder numbering system varies widely among law firms.

Within this system, lawyers generally consider the paper file the official record for their clients and the electronic systems as their own work-in-progress systems. Whenever lawyers accumulate paper documents in their offices it becomes obvious that documents are not making their way into the file. Unfiled e-mails are less obvious. Although the policy for many firms is for e-mails to be printed and the hard copy filed, unless the attorneys or their secretaries are working overtime to print them out, they mostly reside in each attorney's personal folders in the e-mail system. Therefore, at no particular time can it be said that there is a complete file of a matter's documents in either system, paper or electronic.

Law firms are trying to address the e-mail filing problem in one of three ways:

1. Filing e-mails into a document management system (DMS)

2. Filing e-mails into a records management system (RMS)

3. Filing e-mails first into the DMS then declaring them as records into an RMS

However, each of these systems has its drawbacks:

* Filing e-mails into a work-in-progress DMS makes it harder to separate the wheat from the chaff. A DMS contains non-work product as well as work product. A DMS is not a content management system and does not have records retention functionality.

* Filing e-mails into an RMS ensures that the e-mail is automatically declared as a record and has...