Peer to Peer Magazine

55 WWW.ILTANET.ORG down the pace of work is another challenge. Vendors continue to improve their email filing technologies and best practices to make the merging of content and communications in unified maer files the productivity standard to which the industry aspires. New ways of working emerged as aorneys and clients began to communicate and share information in new ways. Today's mobile, tech-savvy professionals expect to access their work product from anywhere, oen on devices that did not exist five years ago. New forms of communication, including text messages, social media, photographs of whiteboard notes and documents scanned with mobile devices are now considered standard business practice and need to be integrated into the common client/maer structure. These changes are overwhelming fixed IT resources in many firms. As shown in ILTA's 2015 Technology Survey, over 30 percent of firms have not yet moved to managing information in a client/maer- centric way, leaving their aorneys to work while accessing documents in one system and email messages in another. Firms struggle with adopting mobile solutions while maintaining security; providing remote access to aorneys that is modern, easy and intuitive to use; and simultaneously securing and governing all information — electronic and paper. Today's Systems Modern systems offer native mobile interfaces that take full advantage of mobile devices, enhanced email management, secure file-sharing and collaboration, increasingly arrived over modems rather than on paper. The benefits of purely electronic communication were evident to clients and aorneys, and within just a few years it was impossible to conceive of doing business without email. However, the volume of email messages and aachments was so significant that it became impossible to continuously print all emails as correspondence and file them in a paper file. The single contextual view of the legal maer, which had been maintained in a physical form for years, was now split between electronic and physical documents. The sheer volume of electronic communications and content, coupled with the added benefits of the ability to search for and edit content quickly and easily in electronic form, spelled the beginning of the end of the physical paper file as a single system of record for a legal maer. Soon innovations integrated email and document management into a single application. Vendors created new maer-centric architectures that allowed the vast empty bucket of document management to be finally organized in the way paper files have been organized for years — by client and maer. The capability of having a client/maer structure in which email messages and documents could be filed, searched and retrieved was compelling. The 2015 Technology Survey published by ILTA reported that 67 percent of firms manage client information electronically in a client/ maer-centric way. Maer-centric collaboration eliminated the need for profiling forms. Metadata assigned at the client or maer level was seamlessly inherited by all content filed in the folder. The quality of metadata in traditional document management systems increased dramatically, which led to significant improvements in search accuracy and utilization. For the first time, electronic content could be automatically associated with a governance policy, enabling records policy application based on client/maer and type of information. This further improved organizations' abilities to manage and govern the groundswell of electronic information. However, email introduced unique challenges and requirements. One challenge was managing aachments as separate work product while maintaining theconversational nature of email. Filing large volumes of email efficiently without slowing The Evolution of Document Management: From Secure Container to Intelligent Productivity Application FEATURES The 2015 Technology Survey published by ILTA reported that 67 percent of firms manage client information electronically in a client/matter- centric way. Access ILTA's 2015 Technology Survey at www.iltanet.org/pubs

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